Polkadot is the only protocol that fits the bill of a blockchain project providing enhanced scalability, speed, security, and utilization, said Peter Mauric – the head of public affairs at Parity Technologies.
In an interview with CryptoPotato, Mauric outlined Polkadot’s advantages over Ethereum and spoke about the project’s parachains.
Polkadot Over Ethereum
Ever since the official launch of the network in 2020 – three years after the ICO – Polkadot, the sharded heterogeneous multichain protocol, has enjoyed a substantial increase in terms of adoption.
Aside from the price appreciation of DOT, its native token, the blockchain infrastructure became the home of countless cryptocurrency-related projects, including DeFi and stablecoins.
CryptoPotato recently had the chance to speak with Peter Mauric – the head of public affairs at Parity Technologies – the organization behind Polkadot. In the interview, he described this impressive demand as “people being ready for another revolution, and Polkadot is the only protocol that fits the bill.”
Being a protocol similar to some extent to Ethereum, Mauric spoke about the comparisons between the two. However, he asserted that there’re also significant differences.
“Everything we have seen since Gavin (Wood) and the team launched Ethereum have been iterations on linear mono-chain smart contract platforms, and Polkadot isn’t that.”
Additionally, Mauric noted that Parity, which also worked on the Ethereum blockchain, is “well aware of its shortcomings.” He added, “it was always a proof of concept of the technology, […] we learned a lot from these experiences, and we have implemented those improvements in Polkadot.”
According to him, one of those upgrades is a better approach to scalability. Polkadot also has “representative on-chain stakeholder governance – something Ethereum doesn’t ever plan to implement.”
Parachains: The Next Generation
Polkadot has been developing parachains for roughly a year in light of some of the scalability issues on other networks. As previously reported, Parity has already outlined plans to build forms of parachains in order to enhance the deployment of assets, reduce the fees, and improve the user experiences.
Mauric described them as ‘the next generation of layer-one blockchain protocols,’ and explained that Polkadot’s relay chain is not a layer one – it’s a “metaprotocol – a layer below these parachain networks, at layer zero.”
“Parachains could be linear monochain smart contracts protocols like Ethereum, Tezos, Solana, or Cardano. They could be UTXO coin transfer chains like Bitcoin or Zcash, or they could be focused on optimizing specific pieces of infrastructure like oracles, prediction markets, or stablecoins.”
Parity’s head of public affairs further spoke about Kusama’s role – which is a ‘canary in the coal mine’ for Polkadot.
Launched a year before Polkadot’s mainnet, Kusama is not a testnet because it has real value, but it’s also not a mainnet because the community uses it to ship unaudited code. This is why Parity made sure everyone is prepared to expect chaos.
Speaking about the potential developments around Polkadot and DeFi in general for the next five years, Mauric added:
“In five years, I’d expect a significant portion of the useful layer-one blockchain protocols to be hosted on or connected to Polkadot.
This includes DeFi, which is going to see a huge, and in my opinion, an improvement – as it learns to live in both synchronous and asynchronous multichain environment.”