Exploring the Future of Parachains & Polkadot 2.0 🌏🌏🌏

The following article explores some of the latest news about the future of Polkadot and provides a variety of resources for our community members to stay up to date with all things Polkadot and OAK Network.

Polkadot experienced impressive development and ecosystem growth in the first half of 2023 by reaching some significant milestones on the Polkadot Roadmap. Our team at OAK Network wanted to take a look at some of the recent advancements within the Polkadot ecosystem and share some of the news about exciting developments coming with the future of Polkadot and OAK Network.

OAK Network staff members had the opportunity to speak about OAK at the latest Polkadot Decoded in Copenhagen and got to hear first hand from Gavin Wood about the future of Polkadot or what many in the ecosystem are calling Polkadot 2.0.

The video is a much watch for anyone interested in Polkadot!

The new path for Polkadot 2.0

With this new approach to envisioning the future of Polkadot, Gavin Wood describes how the Polkadot Network aims to enable a broad spectrum of super computing functionality enabled by heterogenous cores (what we know currently as parachains such as OAK Network) and complex computing power in a manner that remains decentralized, resilient, innovative, high performing, and highly agile.

This reshaped path to development on Polkadot will emphasize collaboration and flexibility which will allow a much greater variety of products, companies, and platforms to build and join the Polkadot ecosystem. Polkadot will support a much greater diversity of computing power and on-chain blockspace will be dynamically accessible.

Key Advancements in Polkadot 2.0

Parachains have come along way since their first mention in the Polkadot White Paper of 2016. Chains like OAK Network and Moonbeam have helped bring users into the ecosystem to create innovative and exciting products and services. Parachains have been heralded as a success within the ecosystem but Gavin Wood also highlighted specific issues in the current system which Polkadot 2.0 is hoping to address. The key issues are as follows:

The current allocation of resources to parachain cores for a full lease duration when the parachain does not require resources for every block is inefficient.
The lack of flexibility in the Polkadot and Kusama auction models which work as a barrier for teams that are currently unable or do not wish to complete a parachain crowdloan.
Parachains lack flexibility in how their lease periods were managed based on the evolution of their chains and products.

The key to the advancement of Polkadot 2.0 is the idea of elastic cores for adaptive computing power. Currently parachains perform similarly to CPU cores in the Polkadot super computer with a static distribution of cores. The new system will instead allow resources such as relay chain security to be distrubuted dynamically based on demand. This has the potential to create huge amounts of efficiency across the ecosystem

The image below visualizes the changes in core assignment and is directly from Gavin’s Decoded presentation.

New parachains and cores will be able to be created with much greater ease and flexibility to suit their specific requirements. Already established parachains like OAK Network will remain as the core automation infrastructure for the Polkadot ecosystem. Our team is especially excited to see what type of new cores are added in the future that we may be able to collaborate with to offer exciting new features to the Polkadot and OAK Network communities.

Gavin Wood was not the only Parity team member to present some exciting news about the future of Polkadot — CEO Björn Wagner also delivered an insightful keynote about the future of Polkadot and parachains.

Björn Wagner CEO of Parity Technologies Keynote Address

Björn describes how Polkadot over the last six years has intentionally focused energy and resources into building the best technical foundation. This focus on technical foundation has brought to life a truly unstoppable blockspace ecosystem which is securely scalable, composable, flexible, governable, and censorship resistant. This work into the technical foundation will future proof the decentralization of the Polkadot Network ensuring its relevancy in the long run.

Björn also described the usefulness of the on-chain collectives core which are currently being used to manage the governance fellowship and discussed how Polkadot 2.0 will utilize the on-chain collectives in the future.

You can find out more information about on-chain collectives in our article about them here .

Exciting New Parachains & Cores

Polkadot 2.0 will also be the home to some exciting new parachains and products that plan to offer a variety of new functionality and efficiency to the ecosystem. Tanssi Network is a new parachain service coming to Polkadot. Tanssi plans to eliminate Appchain infrastructure complexities by making Appchain deployment significantly more accessible.

Tanssi is currently under development by the experienced team at Moondance Labs — You can hear from their founder Francisco Agosti about Tanssi in the video below.

The updates to Polkadot 2.0 and the implementation of services likes Tanssi means that the barrier to entry for teams to build and deliver new features on Polkadot is lower than ever. The Tanssi team predicts that with the use of their tools, developers will be able to build and deploy parachain projects in a matter of weeks instead of months.

You can learn more about the Tanssi Network in the link below.

https://www.tanssi.network/

With new services and infrastructure coming to Polkadot — OAK Network is excited to offer an even greater variety of automation functionality to the ecosystem. Make sure to head to our community Discord to learn more about OAK Network and how you can become involved.

About Ava Protocol

Ava Protocol is an intent-based Eigenlayer AVS that seamlessly enables private autonomous transactions for numerous use cases, such as DeFi, NFTs, and games. We're enhancing decentralized applications with scheduled and recurring payments, stop-loss orders, streaming rewards, and more. Ava Protocol’s event-driven execution model triggers cross-chain transactions based on signals such as time, price changes, and smart contract updates. Developers can easily schedule and automate functions across different blockchains, including Ethereum, ensuring efficient and reliable execution without compromising privacy.