Developers use the technology and tools of Polkadot, like modular development framework substrate, for building sovereign chains that can have their own specialized functionalities and tokens. These sovereign chains connect with the relay chain through dedicated slots and work parallelly, referred to as parachains.
What is a parachain?
Parachain is an integral and essential component that exists in the Polkadot ecosystem. Polkadot is a famous interoperable blockchain platform that helps connect multiple blockchains and enables easy communication. Parachain refers to the heterogeneous blockchains which are connected to the Polkadot ecosystem.
Parachains are interoperable with other parachains and the Polkadot network.
Parachain has derived its name since it runs parallel to the Polkadot relay chain. Therefore, it indicates the parallel nature of these parachain and ensures scalability by parallelizing transaction processing with the Polkadot system. There are several advantages of parachains, such as communicating or interacting with other types of parachains that exist in the Polkadot ecosystem. This guideline covers vast details about what a parachain is, its use cases, its benefits, and how to run parachin on a polkadot ecosystem.
What is Polkadot Parachain?
Parachain is a layer one chain connected to Polkadot’s layer 0r relay chain. This relay chain is in the middle, and parachains run parallel to the relay chain. Collator nodes help in maintaining the parachain. A collator is responsible for retaining all important information of parachain by operating as a full node and helping produce block candidates. Collator passes details for inclusion and verification to the validators of the relay chain. Parachains contain their economies and native tokens. There has been a great buzz related to para chains since they shared the cross-chain interoperability and composability design of Polkadot. This is the reason why parachains can easily receive or send assets or any type of data with different parachains. Parachains can support a host of new applications and use cases. They share and benefit from Polkadot’s governance, scalability, and security feature.
What is a Parachain, and what are its advantages?
- Scalability
The ability to communicate or interact with other blockchain networks or interoperability is one prime factor that defines and illustrates the scalability feature of the blockchain network. Blockchain networks have to depend on layer two solutions for achieving interoperability; however, parachain achieves interoperability at layer one solution itself. This is why parachains are more efficient and decentralized means for achieving throughput and blockchain scalability. Parachain transactions can spread out and process parallel over a blockchain ecosystem with a special layer one blockchain.
- Flexibility
Polkadot provides optimum flexibility in order to model parachains. However, the only important criterion levied by the Polkadot ecosystem is that Polkadot validators must be proved and convinced by the parachain that every block has followed the requisite agreed-upon protocol. In other words, the parachain needs to follow the consensus of the relay chain. Due to this flexible nature, parachain can be easily developed as a chain that carries an individualistic design of its own.
Parachain can run as a private or public network with its own governance process and native token. Parachain can be used as a platform for building applications.
- Interoperability
Interoperability is a prime advantage of parachain, which states that parachain can easily acquire the cross-chain composability feature of Polkadot. As layer one blockchain, parachain can offer full sovereignty and control to the blockchain communities and help them to carry free trade with external networks and other parachains. Parachain can exchange data, tokens, verifiable credentials, smart contract calls, off-chain information, etc. This makes them open to numerous possibilities.
- Governance
Polkadot parachain can adopt the governance model freely. They can integrate different pre-built modules and implement several on-chain governance mechanisms. This on-chain governance feature offers parachin communities the added advantage of accountable transparency and reducing hard fork.
What is Parachain consensus?
There is immense flexibility of parachain in terms of its governance, token, model, and design. Although it brings lots of flexibility, in terms of consensus mechanism, parachain are required to follow the relay chain of Polkadot. Parachains are not allowed to have any other consensus algorithms. In other words, it means that Polkadot parachain is not allowed to execute block finality beyond the trusted scope that Polkadot offers. Parachain can control who and how the blocks will be authored.
What can Parachain be used for?
Polkadot network concept with layer one blockchains of the parachain is widening the use cases of parachain, and several industries or businesses are becoming interested in running projects based on parachain. These industries include smart contracts, credentials, gaming, digital wallets, the Internet of Things, identity verification, decentralized finance, oracles, etc.
What examples of parachin development services do most managing development companies provide?
If you choose a reliable blockchain development company, you can leverage the potential and capabilities of the Polkadot blockchain platform and network into your business project. There is a wide scope of parachain projects that helps to offer development services and ensure business success. Following are the top Polkadot parachain development services that you can get from a good polkadot development company
- Consultancy and conceptualization
Parachain comprises its own model and design; therefore, Polkadot development services include ideation and brainstorming about the type of parachain model which will suit the best for your business.
- Parachain development
Polkadot development companies help in network design, network launch, slot leasing, and building the complete para chain from the beginning. It includes end-to-end parachain modeling and designing the parachain as a public or private blockchain or dApp development platform.
- Token development
Polkadot development companies help run transactions on the parachain network, powering the smart contracts and dApps built over parachain. They even help businesses in developing native tokens for their parachain.
- Smart contract development
Polkadot development company abides by the Polkadot relay chains consensus mechanism and helps companies in developing smart contracts for their parachain. Hiring Polkadot development services will ensure that the smart contracts are well-coded to work within the trust and scope of Polkadot.
- dApps development
Polkadot development services help build interoperable decentralized applications for various use cases such as decentralized finance, digital wallets, and identity verification. If you want to develop parachain from scratch or develop dApps and smart contracts on the parachain network, you need to hire the best parachain development services.
How can you run parachain on polkadot?
If you are interested in developing a Polkadot-based project for your business, you must run parachain on polkadot. The first necessity for performing this function is leasing a slot on the relay chain.
Polkadot parachain slot option offers slots for leasing where parties can bid for the slots using the native token of polka dot named DOT. The lease-out slot of parachain on Polkadot is available to the party for 6 to 2 years. Participating in parachain slot auction parties have to lock the dot amount they want to bid. Once the lease gets over the dot amount will get unlocked. There can be many ways in which interested parties may fund their bases, such as self-fund and crowd loans wherein holders of DOT can contribute while exchanging some reward
What are the cost and fees of running parachain?
It is essential to lease a slot for running parachain on the Polkadot ecosystem; however, you may wonder about the cost and fees included for running parachain. Typically there is no cost required since the full DOT amount which is locked for a particular parachain slot gets unlocked only at the end of the lease time. In other words, parachain can access maximum computing power without requiring to pay huge gas costs or additional fees. The cost or fees of running a parachain can be termed opportunity cost since the DOT in the locked state can’t be used for any other purpose during the lease time.
You may incur a nominal cost if you want to run collator nodes on individual parachain. An additional cost that can be required is associated with slot leasing where the contributors have to be rewarded as the fund has been raised through a crowd loan.
What is Polkadot, and what is its prime purpose?
There are immense benefits of blockchain technology that are well understood by the present generation. However, there are certain drawbacks as well that exist in blockchain technology. Legacy blockchain like Ethereum and Bitcoin struggles to make huge transaction volume, resulting in high transaction fees and network congestion. The main drawback of the blockchain network is the limited capacity to scale. The blockchain community is making new ways possible to solve this main challenge. Some blockchain networks cannot interact with one another. Sending messages from Ethereum to Bitcoin isn’t a straightforward task. Polkadot is a proof-of-stake blockchain network that helps solve the interaction challenges and security issues in blockchain technology and helps build the infrastructure that supports a decentralized web. Polkadot is referred to as blockchain for Blockchains or multi-chain networks because of its immense benefits.
Shared consensus
Polkadot helps in easy communication that takes place between different parachains as well as external networks. This helps in easy dApp development. The feature to extract relevant data and information from specialized chains can help create new decentralized applications. The biggest challenge in developing a blockchain network is developing a robust consensus mechanism and getting about the network’s security. New blockchain network experiences safety and security challenges. However, this is not the case with Polkadot since parachain benefits from the built-in consensus and security feature of Polkadot via the relay chain. This allows developers to concentrate on building the core features and functionalities of the chains instead of strengthening the security of the network.
What is the interoperability feature between the relay chin and Polkadot para chains?
Polkadot parachin helps lower the transaction cost and execute the transaction at a faster speed. As independent parachains don’t share sensitive data with relay chain, Polkadot parachains guarantee an additional layer of security and privacy.
The core technology of the Polkadot is known as the relay chain, which connects the parachains with the ecosystem of the Polkadot. Information can be communicated by Polkadot parachain to the relay chain; however, smart contract functionalities are not supported by it. Relay chain helps parachain to take advantage of its safety and security mechanism. Polkadot network security is shared, and malicious attacks on the parachain are next to impossible. With the increase in the number of validators and parachains, more staking is taking place by the DOT users, which ensures a higher level of security. Polkadot is the best alternative blockchain network to Ethereum as it provides higher speed and scalability features. Parachain has its own rules and tokens regarding governance, transaction fees, and reward.
Polkadot parachains include collator nodes that store the bundle data and transaction history in the blocks and are added to the relay chain. The Polkadot ecosystem is quite vibrant, and as parachain auctions occur, new projects are being announced weekly. Many skilled developers are working within the ecosystem of Polkadot, and it is expected that the user adoption of Polkadot in the upcoming months will increase. The most important factor that developers consider while choosing an ecosystem is how fast and easy will the ecosystem be built in. Polkadot aims to be the best ecosystem, ensuring easy building and deployment.
Why does the future of the Polkadot parachin project so bright?
Even though polkadot parachin development is at the initial stages of development, there are several benefits it can bring within the blockchain space. Polkadot helps process multiple transactions on several para chains, making the platform more scalable than legacy networks.
Polkadot has higher throughput capabilities. DevOps developers are encouraged in customizing their chains with the help of Polkadot. Developers can optimize chains for certain use cases, such as gaming or finance, which helps to improve their security and efficiency. Polkadot has received the support of several developer communities since its official launch as this network helps to launch innovative projects, create tools and build applications seamlessly. Dot token is also entering the top ten cryptocurrency market. The polkadot parachin network is attracting the interests of both investors and developers, which throws light on the fact that the future of the Polkadot blockchain is quite bright.