Ajuna | Polkadot Ecosystem and How it Works
Polkadot rapidly rose to prominence after its launch in 2020, with its native token DOT immediately climbing into crypto’s top ten list. Founded by Ethereum co-founder and former CTO Gavin Wood, its novel multi-chain design provides projects with flexibility, interoperability, and affordable transaction fees.
The network promises to provide the technical foundation for Web3, a decentralized internet of interoperable blockchains called parachains. A software development kit (SDK) called Substrate is available which enables developers to build parachains that can be customized for any use case.
The Role of Kusama and Polkadot
Kusama is a pre-production platform that allows developers to experiment and optimize Substrate-based parachains before launching them on Polkadot. The combination of Polkadot and Kusama is often referred to as the “DotSama” ecosystem.
As a pre-production environment, Kusama has fewer restrictions and offers more flexibility than Polkadot. As a result, it provides a suitable platform to test new features and upgrades. Kusama also has less stringent governance regulations to accommodate developer and user testing.
Launching on Kusama before moving to Polkadot enables projects to build a user base and gain traction in the DotSama community before the project’s official launch.
Flexibility Meets Security — Polkadot’s Network Structure
Kusama is functionally equivalent to Polkadot, enabling developers to innovate in a decentralized environment with real economic incentives. Both operate using two network layers:
The primary network, the relay chain, where transactions are finalized. The parachains, which can be customized for any use, while leveraging the relay chain for security The relay chain and parachains work in tandem to enable interoperability, flexibility, and scalability.
Polkadot’s Practical Advantages
Polkadot’s network structure of independent, yet interoperable parachains has numerous benefits:
1. High Throughput: It enables transactions to be processed in parallel across multiple parachains before the relay chain makes them permanent.
2. Low Transaction Fees: Parallel transaction processing makes Polkadot highly scalable by mitigating network congestion. As a result, Polkadot can host many different applications running on separate chains, which reduces the load on its relay chain and enables scalability. Unlike Ethereum, Polkadot enables lower transaction fees as greater transaction throughput means that there is less competition for processing new blocks. In short, parachains greatly reduce network congestion, which keeps transaction fees low.
3. Interoperability: As all parachains can communicate through the common relay chain, projects on Polkadot can be interoperable.
4. Expandability: The Substrate SDK enables developers to build specialized parachains for their projects. They can also add additional layers or sidechains to augment their parachain or achieve optimal performance.
5. Security: All parachains take advantage of the shared security provided by the common relay chain, which is protected by hundreds of millions of dollars of staked assets. This means that developers have access to a highly secure platform without needing to achieve scale, reducing the barrier to entry and time to market for new Web3 platforms. In addition, parachains can interact with each other while knowing that their counterparty is protected by the same security guarantees.
Simple, Smart Blockchain Building
In many respects, Substrate is Gavin Wood’s response to the limitations of Ethereum. It provides developers with an open-source toolkit with customizable functionality available out of the box.
Once a project secures a parachain slot, its Substrate-based chain can easily be integrated into Polkadot or Kusama to become a parachain. Essentially, Substrate is the SDK with which developers can build parachains, and Polkadot secures the chains, allowing them to communicate with each other.
Substrate reduces the time and complexity of building Polkadot dapps and services; developers can take advantage of preset modules, which they can use as building blocks for the dapps they wish to build.
Upgradability was also a crucial motivator in creating Substrate; constant development in blockchain demands periodic project upgrades, which can be laborious if it involves forking the chain. Substrate offers forkless runtime upgrades, allowing updates to a platform’s functionality and performance with minimal disruption.
Laying the Ground For Web3
The Polkadot network provides a foundation for the future of the internet; the combination of the relay chain and parachains enables interoperability, scalability, and security — all the necessary ingredients for a decentralized internet.
Polkadot’s commitment to an open, decentralized and interoperable Web3 ecosystem was a key reason why we chose it as the technical foundation for Ajuna. We believe that it is the perfect foundation for our vision of a vast, immersive, interoperable and decentralized gameplay universe in which creators and gamers share in the value they create.
About Ajuna
Ajuna Network is a Swiss-based decentralized gaming platform bringing blockchain gaming into the mainstream by integrating GameFi functionality with the world’s leading development engines, Unreal and Unity. Built on Substrate, Ajuna leverages the full potential of the Polkadot ecosystem to provide developers with a modular toolbox to add fully-featured GameFi functionality to their games easily. Ajuna’s ultimate goal is to create real value for both gamers and developers by providing a fully interoperable decentralized ecosystem for games and virtual goods.
Ajuna Network is a decentralized gaming platform that delivers real value to gamers, without compromising on gameplay.
It makes the world’s leading development engines — Unity and Unreal — fully integrated with the world of blockchain-based in-game assets. Now gamers don’t have to choose between real value and real games — Ajuna gives them both.
Real Value: Gamers can own their in-game virtual assets, and protect and control their functionality through a public and decentralized blockchain. Never again will their hard-earned weapons, clothing and items be rendered worthless by the decisions of game company executives.
Real Games: Ajuna games can be created with industry-leading development platforms, while latency is massively reduced by running game engines in powerful, off-chain trusted execution environments (TEEs) linked to the Polkadot blockchain network.
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