Polkadot Parachain Auctions Now Ready To Deploy

Polkadot (DOT), referred by many as the Ethereum-killer, made a massive price rally, adding 25% to its price. The reason – Polkadot’s governance council members approved the network’s parachain auctions.

Parachain auctions are the final core technical element of Polkadot’s whitepaper. Parachains are blockchains that help in connecting with the Polkadot Relay Chain, thereby creating ‘multichain’ architecture. The parachain functionality is the pinnacle of the five years of Polkadot’s development. The process of launching parachains on Polkadot began on May 26, 2020, with the introduction of the initial, proof-of-authority version of the Polkadot Relay Chain.

Gavin Wood and Rob Habermeiner, Polkadot’s founders, announced the news at the Sub0 conference on October 13. According to an official statement by Polkadot, “Wood and Habermeiner explained that parachains, auctions, and crowdloans code is now ready for an initial production release on Polkadot.”

The duo further emphasized that parachains are “the last technical steps necessary to complete before launching parachains on Polkadot were the completion of Polkadot’s full code audit, which is now done, and the finalization of parachain disputes, which can now move forward.”

Meanwhile, parachains proved to be working effectively on Polkadot’s sister blockchain network – Kusama, which is primarily used as a testnet. A total of 12 live parachains are currently operating on Kusama, pushing out several “forkless” upgrades of the testnet. Furthermore, Kusama processed several million transactions, resulting in 2.4 million KSM tokens distributed among 49,000 unique addresses in the form of crowdloan, which only proves significant community participation in the parachain launch process.

However, as Habermeiner noted, there is a fundamental difference between code readiness and code maturity.

“Optimizations in the works include contextual execution, which will speed up block times; parathreads, Polkadot’s pay-as-you-go model for parachain connection; and several low-hanging networking optimizations,” Habermeiner added.

Nevertheless, Polkadot is gearing up with its first batch of auctions, currently under a referendum by Polkadot’s community. If approved, the first batch of five auctions would commence its path on November 11, 2021, with onboarding for the parachains scheduled for December 17th, 2021 for almost a two-year period.

Polkadot’s plan is to have an auction each week for the first batch, while the second batch of six parachain auctions would be scheduled in two-week intervals.

The news about parachain readiness pushed Polkadot’s native governance token just several dollars below its all-time high of $49.69, which occurred on May 15, 2021. DOT’s price movement in the past seven days was calm but spiked shortly after the news to a three-month high of $43.10 before retracting to a current price point of $41.27 per DOT.

Source: CryptoBrowser

Looking at the three-month chart, Polkadot seems to be heading in the right direction, despite the downward pushes in late August, mid-September, and at the start of October. DOT started August with a price point of $17 per DOT only to record a two-fold price increase three months later.