A brief history of Polkadot
Polkadot is the brainchild of Ethereum co-founder, Dr Gavin Wood, but it was not built with the specific intention to replace Ethereum. The idea was to create a platform that would complement Ethereum by removing the ‘middleman’, which would enable blockchains to securely interact with one another, increasing trust within the blockchain community.
Polkadot came into existence after Dr Wood expressed frustration with the slow development of Ethereum. Dr Wood, along with Robert Habermeier and Peter Czaban, founded Polkadot in 2016. This was as part of the Web3 Foundation, which aims to nurture cutting-edge applications for decentralised web software protocols.
The trio had initially intended for Polkadot to use Ethereum technology to build its network, but ended up implementing it on Substrate, a software development framework that’s maintained by Parity Technologies – a company co-founded by Dr Wood in 2015. Substrate was used to create new infrastructure chains parallel to one another called ‘parachains’ that contain specialised logic that can process transactions at high speeds.1
In October 2016, Dr Wood released the first draft of the Polkadot whitepaper, printed on a blush pink sheets of paper speckled with white polka dots. In it, he provides justification for the rationale behind the then-experimental development of the blockchain paradigm that Polkadot would achieve – a multi blockchain network.2
A year later, Dr Wood’s concept of a ‘scalable heterogenous multi-chain’ platform that would serve as a bedrock (or ‘relay-chain’) for hosting parachains became a reality.
This meant the multichain network can process many transactions on numerous parallel chains running at the same time – a unique feature that set Polkadot apart.
In October 2017, Polkadot had its initial coin offering (ICO). It launched its DOT crypto token in 2020 and its launch price was $0.29, with 2.48 million tokens on offer.3
To date, Polkadot has raised more than $200 million from the sales of its DOT cryptocurrency.2 As of December 2021, Polkadot’s market cap was $26 billion.3
