Gavin Wood did a fantastic interview on The Defiant covering the basics of Polkadot. Most of what was said covers the basics of Polkadot, Substrate, and Kusama, and it serves as a good video to introduce individuals to the dotsama ecosystem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-avBxG3u0ik

Here is a write up of the highlights for those who aren’t able to watch the 1.5 hr video.

Gavin

Gavin is one of the original eight founders and CTO of Ethereum. He’s the founder of Polkadot, which is a Layer 0 blockchain, and the 6th largest POS chain.

Gavin first heard of crypto in 2011, and in 2013, he was reminded about crypto through an article in the Guardian about cypherpunks. It was written in a romantic way, about how cypherpunks were taking on the giants of the world, and challenging the broken financial systems. Coupled with the recent financial collapse, the media around the silk road, and he was motivated to reach out to some of the people featured in the article.

After attending a meetup, he came to believe that blockchain would disrupt the world, so he wanted to learn more. He believes that to truly understand something, you have to build on it and implement ideas, so when Jonny Bitcoin—a friend to Vitalik—approached him with the ETH whitepaper, by Dec 2013 (just a few months after the meetup) his curiosity led him to start coding it days later. No one else understood it better at the time, so he became CTO of ETH. They set up a Swiss foundation from there, and the rest is history.

Despite the industry’s focus on finance, Gavin is most interested in Web 3.0. Web 3, to Gavin, is not crypto, but decentralization. The measure of Web 3.0’s success would be if a new developer is looking to build, and they choose web 3, rather than web 2, by default.

It was at the end of 2016 and beginning of 2017 that Gavin made the choice to leave ETH and found Parity. He had been considering a number of ideas around ETH, and he would have liked to stay on ETH, if such a thing were possible, but since it wasn’t, he decided to leave ETH and work on Polkadot.

Polkadot

Polkadot was named this way because of the idea that there’s no center to a polkadot pattern. In most other images, there’s a definitive center to the icon. But polkadots are everywhere.

Polkadot is also playful, and not a term that sounds like complicated math or SF concepts. He feels this is important to appealing to the mainstream.

Gavin believes that Web Assembly, a language that allows webpages to specify computer programs to work on any browser, fast, was an important tool to harness.

He believes that governance should be transparent and open and on chain, with clear rules, which was an issue with ETH (governance on ETH was wishy washy and opaque, fairly centralized since ETH foundation determines which hard fork is "correct", and done offline without clear rules). Governance used to be constrained to in-person, but with blockchain, new models can be discovered.

He believes that sharded chains (parachains) are not only the scaling solution, but each shard should be specialized.

Right now, with most Layer 1s, the foundational smart contract layer is not best suited for every app. This means that developers and users aren’t getting the best experience for their apps because they have to fit the requirements of the smart contract layer rather than building for the best user experience.

With all this in mind, Gavin built Polkadot, a layer 0 relay chain that is focused on proving the security layer to the chains built on top of it. This way, each shard can have its own system that is best suited for what it is trying to achieve. Polkadot has an on-chain governance system that will allow for upgradability without hard forks, with clear rules that are transparent and followed.

The distinguishing elements of Polkadot are that it is a Web Assembly, Consensus Algo, State machine of Shards. This means that to attack any shard, the attacker needs to attack the security layer, or all of Polkadot, which is a big challenge. The shards can operate in parallel, and Polkadot focuses on passing simple messages.

On Polkadot, a shard can choose to have smart contracts or not, or specialize in NFTs only, or defi only. Some shards need high throughput, and others can be highly experimental with different smart contract models.

It is experimentation which makes blockchain great, and Polkadot can have a hundred different experiments, not tied to one smart contract design. Every parachain can makes its own design decisions.

Substrate is a parachain framework (toolkit), that is highly modular, so that developers can quickly adopt and build on Polkadot.

Kusama is a canary network. It is meant for ideas to be tried in a live environment before putting it on polkadot. Polkadot is high value network, and the risks should be minimized as much as possible as systems are complex and it is hard to predict every issue with certainty. Kusama allows for comparable complexity with a substantial economy behind it, ready for live testing. Additionally, Kusama has more validators on it, with generally lower-tier equipment because of its lower returns.

Most new governance ideas are on Kusama, and there are several experiments to determine the best way to bring people together to participate. There are many areas to investigate, such as checks and balances, different speeds of governance execution, etc.

Scaling

There is a limit to parachains, almost certainly, but they haven’t found it and it can be further optimized as necessary.

The more parachains that are added, the more the network effect, and therefore the more messages that need to be passed between chains. It is a snowball effect, which means that complexity is exponentially growing and message passing becomes more expensive.

That said, the original idea that 100 parachains was the limit is no longer true. Gavin believes 100-250 parachains is a realistic number. The limit is based on how expensive it becomes too pass messages on Polkadot.

It’s also possible that the scaling limit won’t be the message passing, but the validating and consensus limit. Since all validators need to speak to each other, there needs to be 10x the number of validators as the number of parachains, at least. This means that after some point, the equipment will become so specialized that it isn’t realistic for a normal actor to participate, and that would cause centralization.

He believes, however, that 1 million transactions per second is definitely feasible. With specialized shards and parallelization, tasks best suited to each shard can be done with higher efficiency than on a single layer 1. Additionally, adding on a layer 1.5, where chains can choose and create their own consensus layer, 100 million transactions per second is feasible with that model.

User Experience and Adoption

Users don’t want to use ETH or the platform token. Users don’t care about the platform they are on. They care about the application they want to use. Right now, the standard is that you have to learn about the application AND the base layer that the application is on.

With Polkadot, people won’t be forced to use or understand the base layer. Gavin believes that it’s important not to get between the developers and the users. On Polkadot, applications can interact with the users directly.

It is Gavin’s opinion that major disruption by his definition still hasn’t happened. He believes that it needs to be tested in a way where it does not become prey to centralized interests, and shows itself as absolutely necessary.

This means that it will either outperform existing systems by a large margin, or, it will be the solution to a crisis.

Tokenomics

DOT’s value is built into the structure of Polkadot, but it’s not something regular users need to know. The demand for DOT comes from the parachain leases. In order to have a parachain slot, each parachain needs to lock up a number of DOT through an auction. It is similar to land being leased. The difference is that the DOT token is locked up, and is not a payment. It is guaranteed to be returned at the end of the lease.

In order to have enough DOT, each parachain can either provide the DOT themselves, or they can crowdloan it by providing incentives to their loaners. There’s no set form to do this. Some have chosen to give loaners tokens. Other models could be through giving NFTs, or giving special access to become a collator, or appeal to user’s future income, or give increased functionality or discounts to crowdloaners.

This lockup, and the demand for Polkadot’s security and toolset, is what creates demand for the DOT token.

Other discussion points

Vitalik has spoken about bridges being a major area of concern, and Gavin agrees. Broadly speaking, bridges have an inverse network effect. When they become important, with enough traffic, they will be attacked and break. To architect an ecosystem over bridges is asking for trouble. If you try to connect blockchains without a secure consensus layer, then sooner or later, something will break.

It would not be far fetched to imagine that the future will only have a few layer 1s being used, and a couple layer 0s that secure the rest of the blockchain ecosystem.

The winner will be the best platform for developers, and the most secure one. As far as Gavin knows, there aren’t really other chains that allow applications to market their services to their users without getting them to buy into the platform they are launching on.

If the system is fair and transparent and does what it says, it is unlikely that there will be a need for another system. The security is part of the network effect, similar to messaging. The more messages that are passed, the more valuable the network. If, however, there is a weak point, then that weak point will be passed like a message down the line, similar to the 2008 financial crisis. If the initial design is broken, the rug is pulled from the wider industry.

Critics of web 3 may not realize that web 3.0 is not crypto. It’s decentralization. It guarantees expectations are met without needing to trust anyone. Building trust into everything is laziness, and corruptible. If you give yourself the power of god, it’s easier, of course.

But when you have powerful people who are trying to kill free societies, and basic rights, then these tools protect our freedoms as a society.

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