In this article, I cover the pros and cons of various projects with no shilling or fud. So this might be interesting to you if you’re already a dot investor or you’ve been thinking about it.

Note: This article is only for educational purpose

Quick Overview

Just a really brief overview and recap of what the Polkadot project is all about. It’s a second-generation blockchain protocol aiming to improve on the first generation ones like ETH 1.0.

And it’s been focused on interoperability and scalability from the get-go. That means you can run dapps, smart contracts and send regular transactions much faster and cheaper.

And because of the interoperability aspect, it can also coordinate and work with other apps and tokens from different blockchains. It has a really unique architecture. It has the main Polkadot blockchain they call the relay chain.

And that uses a consensus mechanism: nPoS or Nominated Proof of Stake. Per testing done in 2020 last year, it can handle up to 1 000 transactions per second which are super fast compared to others out there.

They also have multiple para chains, which are like blockchains that other people can create and customize for their own use cases, and those all connect and feed transactions to the main relay chain as necessary. So that’s what makes it so scalable.

Lastly, in terms of the architecture, they have bridges built in between Polkadots and other big blockchains out there, so that’s pretty useful as well. They raised almost 2 million dollars from their ico in multiple rounds selling the dots token.

And it was founded by Gavin Wood, a famous co-founder of Ethereum, and some other high-profile people in the blockchain space. Gavin also founded parity technologies famous for building the parity wallet, which faced a high-profile bug that a lot of their ico funds and other teams to get locked up forever and inaccessible.

Cons

1-Bear arguments

The first point I want to cover is more of a high-level philosophical question, and that is their core philosophy for Polkadot is it or wrong.

Gavin woods said that Polkadot is the biggest bet against chain maximalism out there.

And I’m not necessarily a maximalist even though I love Bitcoin and Ethereum, but the big question is, will there be useful stuff built on all these hundreds or thousands of different chains that Gavin envisions.

I mean just look at the stats. So many projects are non-existent in terms of transactions, a lot of spam ones are reimbursed by the projects themselves, maybe. And also, a lot of them are bleeding developers the ones who joined in the last macro cycle have since left.

So if it does end up just being a smaller number of survivors and true blockchains that capture most of the value, then maybe they wouldn’t need something like Polkadot to work with each other, and they can build direct bridges from one to another.

That’s just my personal open-ended question about how the space will mature in the future.

2- Ton Of Competitors

Polkadot does brand themselves as interoperable. And playing nicely with all the other projects out there, but let’s be real here: there will still be competition for limited attention adoption and resources to build natively on different chains because they do overlap with other projects.

And that means that they’ll have to compete for adoption amongst the builders and developers.

The first point for this is can it beat the network effects of Ethereum, especially with ETH 2.0 coming along.

I mean, Polkadot is more scalable and interoperable now, and that may last for maybe a year or two more until ETH 2.o gets fully rolled out.

But if performance was all that matters, all the developers and builders would have migrated from ETH to EOS. And as we can tell, that has not happened. So So EOS is like a zombie project now.

Besides Ethereum, many other well-funded projects with stellar teams and novel design spaces are also coming out.

We got near Solana, Cosmos, Aave, Tezos, and much more. They all have a lot of overlap with Polkadot even though theoretically Polkadot can work alongside them and complement them. Read More…