The Pros (and Cons) of building on Polkadot for each market audience.
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Polkadot is composed of two platforms: the Polkadot Cloud and the Polkadot Hub.
These platforms have little overlap in the kinds of users they should appeal to, and the ones we should attract.
The Polkadot Cloud is targeted toward large scale Web3 applications which plan to drive millions of transactions.
One Core on the Polkadot Cloud can execute 1,500 transactions per second, which is approximately 4 billion transactions per month. We have seen applications easily execute nearly 10 million transactions in a month without an issue.
The Polkadot Cloud will be the best place to onboard:
- Businesses that want to migrate already existing large volumes of traffic.
- Custom Web3 solutions, which gain access to low level building primitives.
- Privacy Chains
- Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs)
- Zero-Knowledge Systems
- Large State Chains
- Large File Storage (IPFS, Filecoin, large individual files)
- Large State Trees (billions of items)
- Social Networks
- Feeless transactions
- Subsidized operations and usage
- Businesses looking to abstract the blockchain from their users.
- Low Latency Applications
- Gaming
- MEV Resistance / Control Over Transaction Ordering
- Specific kinds of DeFi
- etc..
- Privacy Chains
The Polkadot Cloud will not be the best place for:
- New businesses that are still trying to create a customer base.
- New developers, as the minimum bar for entry is, relatively speaking, quite high.
- End-users, as the Polkadot Cloud does not offer many services which appeal to this audience.
These kinds of users will instead be directed to the Polkadot Hub.
The Polkadot Hub will be a near-zero-cost entry into the Polkadot Ecosystem.
Like many other blockchain platforms, the Polkadot Hub is a Layer 1 Smart Contract Network, secured by the Polkadot Cloud.
The Polkadot Hub uses a next-generation smart contract platform that is backwards compatible with Solidity smart contracts.
The Polkadot Hub also has Polkadot native features such as:
- Staking
- Governance
- Treasury
- Stablecoins
- etc...
These should appeal to non-developer audiences in addition to developers passionate about the Web3 space.
The Polkadot Hub will be the best place to onboard:
- Low Time Investment Builders
- New Developers
- Tinkerers
- Explorers (i.e. experts from other ecosystems)
- Short-Term Projects
- Hackathons
- Fundraising
- Executing Legal Contracts
- Low Overhead / Small Teams
- Meme coins
- Whitepaper deployment
- Passionate Users
- Active Polkadot Community
- Active Users of Polkadot Hub Applications
- Stablecoin Users
- Polkadot Native Extensions
- Account Abstractions
- DAOs
- Staking Pools
The Polkadot Hub will not be the best place for:
- Doing things at large scale
- Large volume of traffic
- Potential issues with transaction inclusion
- Spikes in fees
- Large volume of data
- Expensive for the business and/or the end users
- Large volume of traffic
- Those who need more control over their application
- See Polkadot Cloud for customizability options.
These kinds of users should go to the Polkadot Cloud.
TODO
There are many pitches which can be used to sell Polkadot to a business.
Audience: This pitch is targeted towards Web3 builders who compare Polkadot to other fragmented solutions like what is found on Ethereum. (separate settlement, execution, and data availability)
The Polkadot Cloud is an all-in-one solution for deploying Web3 applications.
You get:
- Shared Security
- Elastic Scaling
- Battle Tested Rollup SDK
- Used by 40+ rollups, and a number of L1 chains
- Performant Rollups
- High Speed
- Low Costs
- Fast Finality
- Native Interoperability
- Trustless Bridges
- Predictable Fees
- Monthly Subscriptions / Fixed Renewal
- Market Purchases up to 1 month in advance
- Data Availability
This means you have less to worry about!
Focus on your business, let us do the rest.
Audience: This pitch is targeted towards Web2 businesses who offer products and services to a large user base.
Compared to traditional Web2 systems, Web3 systems allows you to remove middlemen between you and your customers.
Whether it be:
- Payments
- Ownership
- Coordination
- Interoperability
Web3 applications allow you to build ecosystems which are native to your application.
Because Polkadot keeps the cost of deploying, using, and scaling Web3 applications low, you get to keep your profits.
Audience: This pitch is targeted towards engineering experts who want to innovate in Web3 without having to rebuild or establish everything from scratch.
The Polkadot Cloud is the most flexible Web3 platform for applications and services.
It makes minimal assumption about what you deploy, affording you maximum flexibility.
With the modular Polkadot Rollup SDK, you can literally have full control of your application.
- Pay fees with ANY token.
- Eliminate user fees all together!
- Have direct control over transaction ordering and priority.
- Write your state transition function in any programming language.
- and more...
Build on the shoulder of giants, without compromising your vision.
Audience: This pitch is targeted towards someone who is Web3 focused. Someone who believes in the underlying mission of what Bitcoin and Ethereum have been bringing to the world.
The Polkadot ecosystem prioritizes resilience at every layer of the network.
- Light-Client-First Technology
- Decentralized, On-Chain Governance
- Trustless Bridges
- Sustainable Treasury
- Consumer Grade Hardware Requirements
- Decentralized Sequencers
- Scalable Validity Proofs
- Horizontal Scaling / Parallelization / Sharding
- etc...
Polkadot does not compromise Web3 principles for vanity metrics or other bullshit.
Polkadot is designed to solve real problems, and deliver on a world with less trust and more truth.
Audience: This pitch is targeted towards "degens" of the crypto community, who are looking for places to find the newest and hottest products in the space.
Polkadot is proud to announce the Polkadot Hub.
The Polkadot Hub is a new L1 blockchain running on the Polkadot Cloud, and a launchpad for builders to tap into over 6 billion dollars in tokens across the Polkadot ecosystem.
The Polkadot Hub will be Ethereum compatible, meaning you can deploy your favorite Solidity smart contracts directly to the Polkadot ecosystem.
The Polkadot Hub has native access to stable coins like USDC and USDT, as well as all of the tokens from the Polkadot ecosystem. The Polkadot Hub also has trustless bridges to Ethereum and other top blockchain ecosystems, meaning that you have worry-free access to basically any token within the crypto market.
On the Polkadot Hub, you can pay transaction fees with any of these tokens, meaning you can even hold and use stablecoins without needing any other token!
The Polkadot Hub is a brand new, untapped resource for explosive product growth by tapping into one of the largest developer communities in the blockchain ecosystem.
With millions of users at your fingertips, there is no better place to launch than the Polkadot Hub. You can have your launchpad ready In: 3, 2, 1...
When presenting Polkadot, you may need to reference specific facts. You should find those here.
-
Founders
-
Milestones
- Polkadot Paper: October 2016
- ICO: October 2017
- Polkadot Cloud - Genesis: May 2020
- Polkadot Cloud - Milestone I (Parachains): November 2021
- First Cloud Services: December 2021
- Gray Paper: April 2024
- Polkadot Cloud - Milestone II (Elastic): October 2024
- Polkadot Hub: TBD
- Polkadot Cloud - Milestone III (JAM): TBD
- Block Time
- The Polkadot Cloud executes at 6 seconds per block
- Services on the Polkadot Cloud can execute up to 0.5 seconds per block
- Finality
- Finality can be as low as 12 seconds (2x 6 second blocks)
- On average, is around 30 seconds.
- 99% percentile is probably around 60 seconds (made up numbers, need data)
- Data Availability
- 10 MB per core per block
- Around 150 MB/s for 100 cores, and 6 second blocks
- Max total TPS achieved on Polkadot Cloud: ??
- Max TPS achieved on Cloud Service: 1,500 TPS
- Max cores utilized: 50
- Nakamoto Coefficient: 120
- Approximately 1/3 the validator size (400)
- Highest among all peers
- Carbon Footprint: 71 TCO₂E / Year
- Lowest among all peers
- Rollups: 40+
- External Polkadot SDK usage:
- Avail (previously Polygon)
- Cardano Midnight
- Bittensor