Updates On Upcoming Polkadot Slot Auction | Key Information Not To Be Missed

【TL; DR】
1. Polkadot Slot Auction will officially begin on November 11, 2021.
2. The first round of five winning items at the Polkadot Slot Auction will be launched on parachains at the same time on December 17.
3. Polkadot slot auction is in line with the KSM slot auction, but the token pledge takes longer.
4. Polkadot aims to solve the Scalability and isolability problems of blockchain.
5. Polkadot Boca adopts the structure of Relay Chain + parachains.
6. Acala is likely to win the first polkadot slot auction, and Moonbeam is also worth noting.
7. Gate.io will provide a one-click participation feature for the slot auction. Stay tuned.


Parachains slots are the core function of the Polkadot network and is the final piece in the Polkadot project. On October 13th, 2021, Gavin Wood, Founder of Polkadot, spoke at Parity's annual online sharing conference. and announced that his company was already technically capable of supporting its first parachains. Motion 118 was also submitted to the Polkadot Council to formally start the auction of parachains slots.


The following day, the Polkadot Council approved the proposal and an auction date was decided for a period of three to six months:
The first round of auction (Batch 1) will consist of 5 auctions. ach round will last for 7 days, and each auction will be held for 7 days.
Round 1: November 11, 2021 to November 18, 2021
Round 2:November 18, 2021 to November 25, 2021
Round 3:November 25, 2021 to December 2, 2021
Round 4: November 2, 2021 to December 9, 2021
Round 5: December 9, 2021 to December 16, 2021
All the winners of this round of auction will be officially launched on December 17, 2021 and will be leased until 20 October 2023.
The second round of auctions (Batch 2) also includes 5 rounds where each round lasts for 7 days, and the next round will be taking place in 14 days.
Round 6:December 23, 2021 to December 30, 2021
Round 7:January 6, 2022 to January 13, 2022
Round 8:January 20, 2022 to January 27, 2022
Round 9:February 17, 2022 to February 24, 2022
Round 10:March 3, 2022 to March 10, 2022
All winners of the second round of auctions will officially launch the parachains on March 11, 2022, with a lease running until October 20, 2023.

Also, on 14th October 2021, the Polkadot community approved Proposition 39 which will be opened for public votes. Hence, the Polkadot slot auction will officially begin from November 11, 2021.

Polkadot Slot Auction with KSM Slot Auction

The Polkadot network links to other blockchain projects through multiple parachains, and the Polkadot main chain acts as a Relay Chain for the system, which plays a role in verifying parallel chains and providing consensus and security.
In order to access the Polkadot Relay Chain, the parachains need the help of a "Slot". However, due to technical factors, the total number of slots is currently very limited. According to Gavin Wood’s statement in July 2020, the number of parachains supported by Polkadot is around 100. In addition, officials have not ruled out increasing the number of slots in the future through technology optimizations such as secondary Relay Chains.
Polkadot Slot uses the same auction facility as Canary Network Kusama, which uses Crowdloan to place tokens on the network and candle auctions to determine winners based on the total amount pledged for each item.In the Crowdloan mechanism, each project in the auction collects tokens and pledges them to the Polkadot Relay Chain. If the project bid fails, the tokens will be returned to the user immediately, and if the project bid is successful, the tokens will be pledged until the end of the slot lease period, and the project party will generally compensate the user for the opportunity cost of holding the tokens.
The difference between Kusuma auctions and Polkadot auctions is that theDOT lock-in time for parachains items in Crowdloan is 96 weeks while the lock-in time of DOT at Kusama auctions was only 48 weeks. In addition, in a KSM slot auction, the item is put on the parachains as soon as it is sold, while at the Polkadot slot auction, the entire round of the auction is joined by an online parachains.

For information on what Polkadot slot is, what is the Polkadot's relationship with Canary Network Kusama, the introduction of auction facility and why the Polkadot slot is so high-profile, check out the following articles:

Will Polkadot_s Parachain Slot Be the Ticket to the Future?

Cryptopedia: An Auction for a Polkadot Parachain Slot

What is the value of Polkadot?
Polkadot aims to be a perfect blockchain expansion solution that does not load smart contracts or run blockchain programs on its own, but can be connected to other blockchain projects via multiple parachains. In this process, the Polkadot main chain acts as a relay chain to verify parachains and provide consensus and security.

According to the assumption of Gavin Wood’s, the "father of Polkadot", Polkadot will be officially launched, it will connect different public chains, thus becoming the Internet of the blockchain world, also known as Web 3.0.
The main organization that leads Polkadot is the Web3 Foundation, also founded by Gavin Wood, which focuses on developing, deploying, and maintaining Web 3.0 technologies and communities. The Web3 Foundation funds will provide fiat currency or token funding to high-end projects in the Polkadot Ecosystem to promote ecosystem construction. In addition, a technology company with the name “Parity” is a major technical team in the Polkadot project. Polkadot is currently using a blockchain framework, Substrate, developed by the Parity team.

Gavin Wood was also one of Ethereum's early developers, so he understood Ethereum's strengths and weaknesses and used innovative architectures in Polkadot to make up for Ethereum's shortcomings. The following image shows Polkadot’s six innovations:


Polkadot's native token is DOT. Polkadot uses a unique NPoS (Certificate of Nomination Rights) consensus mechanism, in which each nominated host takes his own DOT and selects one or more validators he or she trusts, who are responsible for generating new blocks, reaching consensus, verifying parachains and so on.
Thereafter, both the verifier and the nominee can be rewarded based on their equity ratio, in which the verifier also has the right to adjust the distribution or take a commission as more work is required.


Polkadot is primarily based on the Rust language, and Polkadot is one of the largest code bases in the Rust language. In addition, Polkadot developed Substrate, a modular blockchain framework that developers can use to develop their own blockchain with less coding and testing. Furthermore, the developed blockchain is directly compatible with the Polkadot network. Polkadot focuses on solving previous blockchain issues in Scalability and Isolatability.
Ethereum has only one mainchain, and all Ethereum applications run on the mainchain. But as the whole smart contracts ecosystem grows, Ethereum's poor performance (only about 15 TPS) is becoming more evident. When the decentralized application “CryptoKitties” became popular, it alone accounted for more than 20% of the whole Ethereum's traffic, and even caused network congestion at that time. Polkadot abandons the structure of single mainchain, but adopts the structure of Relay Chain + parachains. The Relaychain is tagged as Layer 0, while each parachain is tagged as Layer 1. The parachain is "connected" to the relay chain through slots. If the relay chain is saturated, a new relay chain can be established, so as to achieve unlimited sharding and have unlimited scalability.


In addition, by realizing different functions without parachains and linking to other major public chains or even alliance chains, Polkadot is expected to open up to the entire blockchain industry and break the current notion of each major blockchain project making profit for its own, and truly become the center of the new phase of the Internet.

What projects are worth noting?
Kusuma (KSM) is the canary network of Polkadot, and all operations to be run on the Polkadot need to be previewed on KSM. So far, KSM has completed both rounds of auctions and 11 projects have been auctioned for slots. They are Karura, Moonriver, Shiden, Khala, Bifrost, KILT, Calamari, Basilisk, Altair, Heiko and Kintsugi.


Due to the adjustment of the time of the parachain, the five winners of each round of auction will be on the parachain at the end of the round. The five winners of the first round are worthy of attention at this time.
Karura, who was Acala's front-runner, had a big lead from the start in the first KSM slot auction. Acala is the most important DeFi project in the Polkadot ecosystem, dedicated to helping Polkadot to exchange tokens in parachains and build a complete decentralized financial application system. Acala is expected to be the first to win a slot at this auction.


Another noteworthy project is Moonbeam, whose canary network Moonriver has also been tested and run on the Kusama. Moonbeam has the maximum compatibility with Ethereum smart contracts which helps developers to intervene the Moonbeam chain with the Solidity contract program on Ethereum with minimal changes making them connect with the entire Polkadot ecosystem. Also, last October, Sushiswap announced that it would open a branch on Moonbeam.
Last October, Sushiswap announced it would open a branch on Moonbeam. Thus we need to keep a close watch on.Therefore, Moonbeam is extremely significant.

Conclusions:
As a star project in the current blockchain industry, Polkadot has an extremely ambitious vision and is now one of the strongest competitors in the public chain infrastructure field. In the development of Polkadot, the parachains slot auction is undoubtedly an quite important step.

To keep an update on which projects will win slots and where will the entire Polkadot Ecosystem go, stay tuned to Gate.io.
Also, you can use the Gate.io’s one click participation feature to participate in the Polkadot slot/KSM slot auction. After the auction officially opens on November 11th, we will continue to give you updates on Sesame Finance page.

More Details:
Author: Gate.io Researcher: Ashley. H

*This article represents the views of the author only and does not constitute any investment advice.

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