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.[^22]

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.⁸
• Executing and scaling on standard "gaming" hardware.⁹
• Polkadot SDK is the most robust and flexible blockchain framework.¹⁰
• Secure cross-chain interoperability through trustless bridging protocols.¹¹

Where is Polkadot leading?

• 50+ active roll-ups live on Polkadot.¹²
• Among the highest Nakamoto coefficients in the blockchain ecosystem.¹³
• 2nd largest developer community after Ethereum.¹⁴
• Blazing fast execution speeds compared to other blockchain VMs.¹⁵
• One of the largest functioning DAOs, managing the functionality of the network and tens of millions of dollars in assets for development.¹⁶

[^22] - Learn about forkless runtime upgrades in Polkadot: - https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/learn-runtime-upgrades

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1. • 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
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2. • Explanation of sharding on Polkadot:
     • https://polkadot.com/blog/polkadot-v1-0-sharding-and-economic-security
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3. • A high level overview of shared security:
     • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKQOSPfM-W0
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4. • A blog post explaining the term "blockspace":
     • https://www.rob.tech/blog/polkadot-blockspace-over-blockchains/
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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
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6. • Build applications where end-users pay no transaction fees.
   • Build applications more resilient to MEV.
   • Build applications which can prioritize tasks and processes.
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7. • A demo of a Polkadot SDK blockchain producing blocks every .5 seconds:
     • https://twitter.com/bkchr/status/1818027282688352591
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8. • Compare that to optimistic rollups which may take up to a week!
   • Block production is separated from finality, reducing network stalls:
     • https://polkadot.com/blog/polkadot-consensus-part-1-introduction
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9. • Hardware requirements for running a Polkadot Validator:
     • https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/maintain-guides-how-to-validate-polkadot#requirements
   • Compared to expensive and centralized machines needed for vertical scaling or ZK provers.
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10. • 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.
      • https://www.availproject.org/
      • https://midnight.network/
      • https://entropy.xyz/
      • and more...
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11. • 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
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12. • A list of active parachains on Polkadot:
      • https://polkadot.subscan.io/parachain
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13. • The Nakamoto Coefficient is one measure of decentralization and resilience.
    • A third party service comparing the Nakamoto Coefficient:
      • https://nakaflow.io/
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14. • 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
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15. • PVM and other VM benchmarks:
      • https://github.com/koute/polkavm/blob/master/BENCHMARKS.md
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16. • Polkadot Treasury Account:
      • https://polkadot.subscan.io/account/13UVJyLnbVp9RBZYFwFGyDvVd1y27Tt8tkntv6Q7JVPhFsTB
    • Information about the Polkadot DAO:
      • https://polkadot.com/platform/dao
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