First, let’s face some of Polkadot’s current problems.
- The slot auction mechanism fails as value capture. The cost of renewing the slot for the best parachain is the same as that of other general parachains, and the DOT locked in the slot will be pitiful, even less than a year of inflation to issue additional DOT.
- The claimed cross-chain protocol also fails. Obviously, the EVM camp is strong enough, but the cross-chain bridge has not appeared, which has affected both Dotsama’s ecological funds and users.
- Claiming that Polkadot is an L0 protocol is still a long way from success. Even the best L1 projects of the Polkadot ecosystem are not attractive enough, and the ability and funds to promote the construction of the L1 ecosystem are not sufficiently competitive.
- Polkadot adoption falls short of expectations:
The 12s parachain block time is very behind in L1.
The front-end and wallet UX is poor, and the styles of polkadot.js and Metamask are too different. They do not support xcm cross-chain operations and swap, or even multi-token display.
Multi-chain multi-gas tokens. Users need to acquire a lot of gas tokens to experience the business of each parachain.
Due to the competition between kusama and Polkadot, it is difficult for the parachain team to have the energy to operate two versions of the network.
Substrate development is difficult and inefficient, and many parachain teams need to spend a lot of effort to track the iteration of the relaychain version. Many parachain teams can’t find a reason to develop a chain.
More and more parachain teams only regard parachains as an option in the layout, and use parachains as smart contracts to build businesses. This is a waste of the performance of a blockchain, and this is an uneconomical approach. Grant applications, most projects do not have the will to get a slot.
In the Polkadot ecosystem, the model of applying for funds from the treasury also failed. No one will find projects worth supporting in the ecology, no one will be blamed, no one will take risks, and finally a typical public tragedy.
Of course, for many users who are not so familiar with Polkadot, the most complaints are the poor experience. Developers need to tap the slot to join. This has a threshold, unlike Ethereum, which has no entry threshold.
If Polkadot is compared to a team that sells tickets, the slot auction is equivalent to selling only VIP tickets, and the parathread is equivalent to the tickets controlled by the scalpers. Most of the tickets should be sold by market-based means.
However, Polkadot regards selling VIP packages as the main sales method, and currently sells all tickets as VIP packages, but it doesn’t make money, and it is also scolded.
If you are the general manager of team operations, it is very simple to solve the current problem. You can take out most of the tickets and sell them by market-based means. If the arena has only 20,000 seats and 40,000 fans come to buy tickets, it means that the price of the ticket is too low. If only 10,000 fans come to buy tickets, it means that the price of the ticket is too high. For local tyrants who are not price-sensitive, they can sell expensive VIP packages to them. For most price-sensitive fans, they can sell them at a market-based price for each game ticket. These fans need to restrain their desires and make choices. , corresponding to the parachain, that is, the gas price is high, and users need to be more cautious about on-chain operations.
This is the gas and gas price model of Ethereum, which is very classic, successful and working. The Polkadot relaychain provides a limited supply of slots, and the demand for slots in parachains cannot completely adopt the auction model between the two, but should join the market-based model with the highest price. Next let’s explore a possible overall solution.
- The relaychain native token DOT can be used for the gas of the parachain, which avoids the difficulty for users to obtain various gas tokens and facilitates users to experience more parachain services.
- Using a common address format similar to Ethereum, different parachains use different address formats, which really drives users crazy.
- Some new slots are added for market operation, and the current auction mechanism does not need to be changed. This is completely different from parathread. Parathread are the exclusive rights of multiple parachains to produce blocks in a block, while the market-oriented operation of slots is the bidding competition of multiple parachains for multiple slots, which is equivalent to fans for tickets. Through market-oriented means, the less willing will be squeezed into the parathread, and the more willing will be squeezed into the slot auction.
For parachains participating in the marketization of slots, gas can be either native tokens or DOT, but most of them are burned, and a small part is allocated to relaychain verification nodes and parachain collector nodes. Allocating part of the gas funds to the parachain collector nodes can also better maintain the availability of parachain data.
All parachains have their own swap module to provide transaction liquidity of DOT and native tokens. The relaychain sets a gas price (priced in DOT) for the parachain according to the gas consumption of the parachain in the past period of time. The parachain is based on the gas price. , and the exchange rate in its own swap, constantly adjusting the gas price of native tokens.
If there are 50 slots in the market, but there are 51 parachains, then each block will inevitably have a parachain that cannot get a slot, then only the parachain with the least gas consumption in the past period of time can be squeezed to the parathread, this is the cruelty of market competition, but also the most effective way.
The overall solution, in fact, has the same goal as many other sharding designs. They are all security verification as a service. The Ethereum 2.0 solution is also the same idea. However, Polkadot is easier to upgrade and transform, and it can be realized faster and more acceptable to everyone using sharding architecture scheme. The overall solution can obviously solve the problem of slot auction threshold. Any parachain team can directly join the slot market without paying for the slot. There are not enough seats every time, is this a problem of not enough seats? This is the problem that you don’t have enough money, so such a parachain can choose to go to the parachain market of the second-tier relaychain.
