The creators of the Polkadot blockchain have issued a new roadmap that lays the way for some significant operational adjustments within the next few months.
Rob Habermeier, the co-founder of Polkadot, stated in a press release that Parity Technologies, the company behind the blockchain, has created various solutions to improve Polkadot’s operations.
According to Habermeier, these span several areas, including parachain scalability, parachain development, relay-chain governance, cross-chain communication, common-good parachains, linking to other ecosystems, and staking. The team had been hard at work producing the code for these improvements and updates and were eager for the Polkadot community to welcome them.
1/ Keep in the loop of what’s happening in the Polkadot ecosystem: check out this #PolkadotRoundup to learn about the new features, milestones, and the latest announcements from the parachain teams, ecosystem projects, and infrastructure providers.
Read the 🧵 below pic.twitter.com/Ui70j05NtN
— Polkadot @Token2049 (@Polkadot) September 26, 2022
The co-founder of the blockchain notes that the anticipated upgrades will enable Polkadot to gain or enhance the following capabilities:
Parathreads / Next-Generation Scheduling
Parathreads are pay-as-you-go parachains that make launching a blockchain as simple as launching a smart contract. According to Parity Technologies, the deployment of parathreads would occur between the first and second quarters of 2023.
XCMv3
Polkadot’s cross-consensus messaging (XCM), a universal language developed for cross-chain communication inside and outside of the blockchain’s ecosystem, will be released before the end of 2022.
FRAME: Weights V2
The second iteration of weights, the method by which Substrate transactions and activities are assessed against block capacity, will yield multidimensional consequences. According to Habermeier, these measures include execution time and the amount of state accessible by a given operation, and the new version will be available for usage by mid-October 2022.
Governance Reform
The governance system of Polkadot is planned to change with an agile upgrade that eliminates the council and technical committees, adds the Polkadot Fellowship, and moves all decisions to blockchain community referendums. The new method will be implemented at the start of the fourth quarter of 2022, after a community vote and token holder acceptance.
Collectives Parachain
The Common Good Parachains team of the blockchain has been doing final testing for Polkadot Collectives, a new parachain with a projected launch date of October 2022.
Bridge Hub
The bridges team at Parity has been developing a Polkadot-Kusama bridge with a bridge hub intended to provide message routing services inside each network. The debut is slated for the end of 2022.
Nomination Pools & Fast Unstake
Polkadot is also continuing its march toward a future filled with proof-of-stake blockchains, with Nomination pools, which let users create permissionless stake pools that others can join, playing a role in these efforts.
As of the 0.9.28 version, nomination pools will be introduced to Polkadot, although no pools may be formed using the default specifications. According to Habermeier, once this runtime is implemented, a governance proposal may specify the initial parameters, such as how many pools can be created, how many users can join, etc.
Staking Dashboard
In addition to expanding the capabilities of the staking protocol itself, Polkadot’s engineers acknowledge the necessity to make staking as accessible as possible to end users. As part of these efforts, the Staking Dashboard will soon exit open beta, although it is already fully functional and can already be used, according to the blockchain’s co-founder.
Disputes Slashing
The parachains protocol of Polkadot went operational in December 2017, and dispute slashing will be enabled by the end of this year. Consequently, validators who present invalid parachain blocks will have their entire stake sliced, and validators who initiate invalid disputes will have a tiny portion of their stake slashed to deter spam.