Is Polkadot Ready for Parachain Auctions?

Introduction

With the years of a visionary approach to developing the heterogeneous multichain framework, Parachain is all set to be launched on Polkadot now.

Recently, the Polkadot founders Gavin Wood and Robert Habermeier have announced the opening up of the first Parachain network slot in the form of a grand auction beginning from November 11th, 2021.

In just half a decade Polkadot masterminds have brought the final piece of their core technology mentioned in the whitepaper to actionable form and are all boosted up to introduce the groundbreaking multichain architecture in the crypto sphere.

Is Polkadot technically ready?

While addressing the conference on behalf of Parity Technologies, the Web 3 Foundation has explained that all the technical barriers concerning the Parachain launch on Polkadot have been dealt with. The last step before the Parachain auction was completing the full code audit to finalize the Parachain disputes.

Precisely, Polkadot‘s canary network, Kusama which was launched on June 3rd, 2021 has been running successfully on the platform. Since its introduction 11 Parachain slot auctions have already taken place on Kusama. This total would make it to dozen with the launch of Parachain.

The Parachain teams have given sincere consideration to the several forkless network upgrades and have processed a million transactions in collaboration with Kusama Parachain. So far around 2.4 million KSM have shown their active contribution to the crowd loans backed by more than 49 k unique addresses.

The significant Polkadot‘s community participation in the Kusama architecture for over the last four months is the reliable ground to ensure the readiness of   Polkadot for the final Parachain launch.

Is Polkadot mature?

Do readiness and maturity mean the same thing? Yes, we agree Polkadot is technically ready to support the Parachain auction but is it even mature?  As mentioned Parachain code is well integrated, tested, audited, deployed, and demonstrated which indicates its readiness for the auction.

On the other hand, maturity refers to ensuring codes are highly optimized, stable, and battle-tested to mitigate the bugs.  At present Polkadot requires more contextual execution to bridge the prevailing readiness and maturity gap in the Polkadot architecture.

As a result, Parity Technologies have planned to adopt a conservative approach for the Parachain rollout until the codes become mature. Moreover, the team aims to command the Parachain onboarding to Polkadot so that they do not exceed 75% of the Kusama numbers.

How about the DOT race?

The DOT which is the native asset of the Polkadot network will be brought to use for the Parachain auctions.  The requirement of DOT to obtain a slot completely depends on the efficient market mechanism. Precisely, Polkadot architecture is designed to ensure that 20% of the DOT ends up being a part of the Parachain network over time

Auction Process and Schedule

The Polkadot‘s powerful edge over technical aspects has become the clear reason for Polkadot’s governance to plan the Parachain auction.

Thus, the technical readiness of the Polkadot platform has led to the submission of Parachain motion 118 to the council. According to the proposal, the auction will take place through a public referendum in the two major batches consisting of several sub–batches.

The first major batch consists of 5 Parachain auctions whereas the second one would be consisting of 6 auctions. Approximately these auction schedule is expected to begin on 11^th November 2021 and end somewhere in January 2024.  Please note that the schedule provided below consists of approximated dates.

In all these cases the winning Parachain onboarding is expected to begin from 17^th December 2021 to 20^th October 2023.

For the batch 2 winning Parachain onboarding, the period extends from 11^th March 2022 to 12^th January 2024.

A Way Ahead

For everyone aiming to participate in Parachain crowd loans, need to unbind DOT tokens and adhere to the current unbinding period of 28 days.

User-centered activities like registering for parachains, opening crowd loans are yet to be enabled by Polkadot governance. But one thing which cannot be denied is that Polkadot’s Parachain auction is a way towards enriching the health of the crypto sphere in the long run.