Polkadot Direction

Info

The material on this page is based on Gavin Wood's talk at Polkadot Decoded 2023.

Understanding what Polkadot 2.0 will help us envision the future direction of the Polkadot ecosystem toward abstraction and generalization.

Offloading Tasks to System Chains

Polkadot 1.0 was a chain-centric paradigm comprising domain-specific rollups that could exchange messages. Trusted communication channels are ensured via a shared security mechanism provided by the ELVES protocol, Polkadot's rollup technology. Polkadot not only provides message-passing capability, but also extra functionalities such as staking, accounts, balances, and governance. Having a chain-centric system will ultimately end in a chain-centric application and UX.

The true innovation of Polkadot is about leveraging the unique value proposition offered by different chains and using those chains’ collaborative potential to build inter-chain applications to solve real-world problems. Those applications will thus need to span across chains.

Increasingly fewer tasks will be handled by the relay chain which will focus efforts only on primary tasks: securing the network and providing secure message-passing capability. System parachains will be used to take over secondary relay chain tasks such as staking, governance, etc.

XCM and Accords

XCMP is the transport layer for delivering XCM messages. It gives the transportation method and a secure route but not a framework for binding agreements.

XCM is a format, a language of intention abstracted over functionality common within chains. It creates an expressive language of what you intend to do or want to happen. XCM messages are transported between different chains using XCMP. Ideally, in a fully trustless environment, strong guarantees ensure chains faithfully interpret XCM messages. We can have a secure mode of delivering messages that can be interpreted across protocols, but still messages might be misinterpreted. These guarantees can be achieved with accords.

An Accord is an opt-in treaty across many chains, where treaty logic cannot be changed or undermined by one or more of those chains, and Polkadot guarantees faithful execution of this logic. Accords will be specific to a particular function, and any chain that enters the accord will be held to it and will serve that particular function. To lower the entry barrier, accords can be proposed permissionlessly, but because they are opt-in, the accord proposal will take effect until chains agree and sign up.

To sum up, accords ensure that the receiver faithfully interprets XCM messages securely sent via XCMP channels. Accords are the missing piece of the puzzle to achieve a fully trustless and collaborative environment between applications.

Polkadot is the only ecosystem where accords can properly exist because it has a homogenous security layer that provides a specific state transition function for each logic component. This allows patterns of cooperation between multiple logic components (i.e., trans-applications) that would not be possible to achieve over bridges.

Accords will be implemented using SPREE technology.

Agile Core Usage

In Polkadot 1.0, one core is assigned to one application (in this case, equivalent to a parachain). Ideally, core affinity (i.e., which application operates on which core) is unimportant (see below). Cores do not have any higher friendliness to one application than another.

Here, we remove the assumption that each application owns a core and instead that all cores are a resource to be consumed and used as needed by all applications in the ecosystem.

Compressed Cores

The same core can secure multiple blocks of the same application simultaneously. Combining multiple application blocks in the same relay chain core will reduce latency at the expense of increased bandwidth for the fixed price of opening and closing a block.

Shared Cores

Sharing cores with other applications to share costs but with no reduction in latency. Note that this is different from the split coretime where one core is used by multiple application at different times to share costs at the expense of higher latency. Shared cores will be enabled with JAM, a semi-coherent system in which data from different shards can be scheduled within the same core.

Agile Composable Computer

All the options of agile coretime allocation and core usage can be composable and enable the creation of an agile decentralized global computing system.

Thus, this new vision is focused on Polkadot’s resource, which is secure, flexible, and available blockspace that can be accessed by reserving some time on a core. Agility in allocating coretime and using cores allows for maximized network efficiency and blockspace usage.

Polkadot's Resilience

Systems that have yet to be engineered with decentralization, cryptography, and game theory in mind are breakable and prone to cyber-attacks. Polkadot is basing its resilience on different pillars:

• Preponderance of light-client usage: Centralized RPC servers are common but susceptible to attack and not trustless decentralized entry points to using blockchain-based applications. Light client usage on Polkadot is possible through Smoldot.
• Zero-Knowledge (ZK) Primitives: They can have a problematic effect on censorship and centralization as having a big state transition function boiled down to a single proof of correct execution. However, a library of richly featured and high-performance ZK primitives ready for specific use cases is being built. The first use-case will be used to improve privacy for on-chain collectives such as the Polkadot Technical Fellowship.
• SAFROLE consensus: New forkless block-production consensus algorithm replacing BABE and where blocks are not produced unless they are expected to be finalized. This will provide several benefits, such as:
• Improved security, parachain performance, and UX from being forkless
• Preventing front-running attacks through high-performance transaction routing where transactions are included in blocks in one hop instead of being gossiped, and transaction encryption.
• Internode Mixnet: Shielded transport for short messages that avoids leaking IP information for transactions, and introduces a general messaging system allowing users, chains and off-chain workers, smart contracts, pallets, and anything else existing within a chain to exchange messages containing signatures, intentions, etc.
• Social Decentralization: Resilience is achieved by including many participants contributing to the system and coming to decisions through on-chain governance. Involving as many people as possible ensures resilience against spending becoming systemically misjudged and appropriately directs wealth for spending treasury funds, salaries, and grants. Another crucial way of decentralizing the network is ensuring experts on which the maintenance of the system relies upon are incentivized and recruited over time by the Polkadot network and not by organizations within the Polkadot ecosystem.