the announcement of the founder of Polkadot Gavin Wood

The Polkadot network is "very close to launch," founder Gavin Wood told attendees of the Ready Layer One (RL1) virtual conference on Wednesday 6 May.

Polkadot's goal

Wood, who wrote Ethereum's technical paper in 2014, created Polkadot with the intention of allowing users to send transactions through blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum through a process that can make different blockchains interoperable with each other.

Polkadot acts under the supervision of the Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies, both founded and led by Wood himself. The network made a $ 145 million token sale in 2017 and launched its Kusama network in July 2019. Since then, Polkadot has focused on integrations with other networks such as Chainlink and Polymath.

The plan for the launch of Polkadot

Similarly to what happened with Kusama, Wood told RL1 participants that Polkadot will be launched in five or six phases, starting with a "chain candidate" launched by the Web3 Foundation. The candidate actually acts as a genesis block for the network, but remains under the leadership of the Web3 Foundation developers.

If the candidate does not meet the team's requirements during this initial phase, he will be replaced by another, Wood said. In particular, the network will be launched with a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus algorithm invented by Wood, which initially will provide all online authority to the Web3 Foundation, the nonprofit behind Polkadot.

Therefore, the Polkadot network will have limited functionality, said Wood. "This allows us to start the chain without having to have a set of validators already assembled and without having to rely on our potentially incomplete governance structures to advance the chain", said Wood.

From PoA to PoS

The PoA structure is not unlike the NEAR protocol, another Ethereum competitor who announced the launch of its core network earlier this week. NEAR is also spreading in a highly limited form.

The subsequent phases of the Polkadot implementation will send the network's DOT tokens to the owners and will train the validators for the planned transition to a PoS. This work will be overseen by a "Sudo module," said Wood, who will regulate how the blockchain structure will initially be formed.

This module will eventually be dissolved, with DOT token holders taking control of the network towards the final phase of the Polkadot launch. The Sudo module and general launch structure are a "staging as much as a proposal" to evolve the chain from something limited to something unlicensed, said Wood.

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