awesome-hez/playbook.md

The Polkadot Playbook

The minimum set of information you need to be able to explain Polkadot to others.

What is Polkadot?

• Polkadot is a scaling solution for Web3¹ applications and services.
• Polkadot scales through data and execution sharding, allowing for parallelized throughput.²
• Polkadot provides shared security and interoperability to services build on it.³
• Polkadot creates abundant, flexible, and high quality blockspace.⁴
• Polkadot uses a novel "cynical" rollup to provide fast finality while using minimal resources.⁵

What unique things can you do on Polkadot?

• Build applications which execute automatically (without initial user input).
• Build applications with full control over block construction and transaction execution.⁶
• Build applications which dynamically scale up and down execution cores.
• Build applications which execute at sub-second speeds.⁷
• Build applications that can permissionlessly upgrade and evolve over time.⁸

Why choose Polkadot?

• Billions of dollars of economic security provided to itself and applications running on it.
• Fast finalization times, on average under 30 seconds.⁹
• Executing and scaling on standard "gaming" hardware.¹⁰
• Polkadot SDK is the most robust and flexible blockchain framework.¹¹
• Secure cross-chain interoperability through trustless bridging protocols.¹²

Where is Polkadot leading?

• 50+ active roll-ups live on Polkadot.¹³
• Among the highest Nakamoto coefficients in the blockchain ecosystem.¹⁴
• 2nd largest developer community after Ethereum.¹⁵
• Blazing fast execution speeds compared to other blockchain VMs.¹⁶
• One of the largest functioning DAOs, managing the functionality of the network and tens of millions of dollars in assets for development.¹⁷

Polkadot Comparisons

• Ethereum: Polkadot realized Ethereum's scaling vision, first delivered by co-founder Dr. Gavin Wood. ¹⁸
• Solana: Unlike Solana, Polkadot scales without compromising Web3 principles of decentralization and security.¹⁹
• Cosmos: Unlike Cosmos, Polkadot provides shared security and secure interoperability.²⁰
• Avalanche: Subnets in Avalanche are not as flexible as applications on Polkadot, and subnets do not provide shared security or secure interoperability.²¹
• Layer 2s: Layer 2 solutions face performance issues, unpredictable fees, and fragmented interoperability due to non-native support for rollups.²²

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1. Learn more about Web3:

   • The first time the term "Web3" was used: https://gavwood.com/dappsweb3.html
   • A blog post describing the importance of Web3: https://gavofyork.medium.com/why-we-need-web-3-0-5da4f2bf95ab
   ↩︎

2. Explanation of sharding on Polkadot: https://polkadot.com/blog/polkadot-v1-0-sharding-and-economic-security ↩︎

3. A high level overview of shared security: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKQOSPfM-W0 ↩︎

4. A blog post explaining the term "blockspace": https://www.rob.tech/blog/polkadot-blockspace-over-blockchains/ ↩︎

5. • The ELVES paper, formally describing Polkadot's cynical rollup: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/961
   • A tweet summary of the ELVES paper: https://x.com/rphmeier/status/1807884271157187007
   ↩︎

6. For example:

   • Build applications where end-users pay no transaction fees.
   • Build applications more resilient to MEV.
   • Build applications which can prioritize tasks and processes.
   ↩︎

7. A demo of a Polkadot SDK blockchain producing blocks every .5 seconds: https://twitter.com/bkchr/status/1818027282688352591 ↩︎

8. Learn about forkless runtime upgrades in Polkadot: https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/learn-runtime-upgrades ↩︎

9. Learn more about cynical rollups:

   • Compare that to optimistic rollups which may take up to a week to finalize!
   • Cynical rollups actively check that a block is valid, rather than waiting for someone to report it is invalid. See ELVES paper footnote above.
   • Compared to "instant finality" consensus, block production is separated from finality, reducing network stalls: https://polkadot.com/blog/polkadot-consensus-part-1-introduction
   ↩︎

10. Compared to expensive and centralized machines needed for vertical scaling or ZK provers.

    • Hardware requirements for running a Polkadot Validator: https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/maintain-guides-how-to-validate-polkadot#requirements
    ↩︎

11. Polkadot SDK is used throughout the entire blockchain ecosystem:

    • Polkadot and Kusama are built with the Polkadot SDK.
    • All 50+ live parachains, and many more in development, all use Polkadot SDK.
    • Many projects outside of Polkadot also use the Polkadot SDK: Avail, Cardano, Entropy, and more...
    ↩︎

12. Bridging in Polkadot can be broken down into internal bridges and external bridges:

    • Native bridging protocol for applications secured by Polkadot: https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/learn-xcm-transport
    • An overview of external bridges on Polkadot: https://polkadot.com/blog/the-landscape-of-trustless-bridges-on-polkadot
    ↩︎

13. A list of active parachains on Polkadot: https://polkadot.subscan.io/parachain ↩︎

14. The Nakamoto Coefficient is one measure of decentralization and resilience.

    • A third party service comparing the Nakamoto Coefficient: https://nakaflow.io/
    ↩︎

15. Graph of blockchain developer ecosystems: https://twitter.com/Polkadot/status/1577016988697706496

    • The raw data is being generated using this open source repo: https://github.com/electric-capital/crypto-ecosystems
    ↩︎

16. PVM and other VM benchmarks: https://github.com/koute/polkavm/blob/master/BENCHMARKS.md ↩︎

17. Information about the Polkadot DAO: https://polkadot.com/platform/dao

    • Polkadot Treasury Account: https://polkadot.subscan.io/account/13UVJyLnbVp9RBZYFwFGyDvVd1y27Tt8tkntv6Q7JVPhFsTB
    ↩︎

18. Polkadot comparison document to Ethereum:

    • https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/learn-comparisons-ethereum-2
    ↩︎

19. Solana is better described as a distributed database, than a Web3 product.

    • Information about the scalability trilemma: https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/vision/
    • Solana scales vertically while Polkadot scales horizontally.
    • Since January 2022, Solana has seen around half a dozen significant outages and 15 partial or major outage days: https://cointelegraph.com/news/solana-outage-client-diversity-beta
    ↩︎

20. Polkadot comparison document to Cosmos:

    • https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/learn-comparisons-cosmos
    ↩︎

21. Polkadot comparison document to Avalanche:

    • https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/learn-comparisons-avalanche
    ↩︎

22. Polkadot comparison document to Layer 2s and Rollups:

    • https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/learn-comparisons-rollups
    ↩︎