Most of the noise in the Cryptoverse in the past few months has been centered around the astronomical rise of Bitcoin, and lately the Ethereum’s rise to dominance powered by DeFi boom. In between, the XRP coin by Ripple made its way to the headlines too with the SEC filing a lawsuit against the fourth largest crypto coin currently. Amid all this mayhem, another promising blockchain project was slowly climbing up the ladder of prominence.
Not to keep you guessing for longer, I am talking about Polkadot — a next-gen blockchain that aims to drastically improve on the shortcoming of its contemporary Ethereum. However, Polkadot is not the first such project to claim this — over the years, we have heard about infamously titled “Ethereum killers” like EOS, which eventually fizzled out.
Despite its scalability issues, the premier smart contracts platform of Ethereum has continued to dominate the crypto space as the primary choice of programmers to develop decentralized applications (dApps). But in the emerging DeFi space, many of the current projects are being developed on the Polkadot protocol. From September to November 2020 alone, roughly 19% of DeFi projects that received venture funding were building on Polkadot.
Owing to this sudden rise in popularity, the platform’s native DOT token has increased its market cap significantly in recent weeks and months. It is currently the fifth-largest crypto with $15.50 billion (currently trading around $17.30), slightly behind XRP ($16.99 billion) — which it had overtaken a few weeks ago to even become the 4th largest crypto.
I remember introducing the Polkadot blockchain in one of my writeups, back in mid-2019. Just to briefly summarize, it is an open-source “para chain (parallelized chains)” framework whose aim is to address scalability, interoperability, developability and governance issues — visualize a multi-chain decentralized economic hub, where all networks can communicate in a secure, scalable & decentralized fashion.
What makes it even more interesting is that the project is the brainchild of Ethereum co-founder Dr. Gavin Wood. While Ethereum recently took the first steps towards the long and arduous journey towards a Proof of Stake network dubbed as Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot is already a proof-of-stake blockchain network — going live back in May 2020.
No doubt then, that it has emerged as the most popular alternative to Ethereum for decentralized finance (DeFi) investment purposes. According to Block Research, Polkadot’s ecosystem already consists of a total of 127 projects across sixteen different verticals that are currently building on the network.
XRP will likely remain under pressure for the foreseeable future — at least till the time its row with SEC is addressed. And with an impressive portfolio under its belt, the DOT coin might overtake XRP again. In addition to that, Polkadot’s impressive features might even threaten the hegemony of the Alt. coin king Ethereum in a more meaningful way than some of its predecessors were able to do so. The future of blockchain is here.
Originally Published on Medium
Email ??| Twitter ?? | LinkedIn ??| StockTwits ?? | Telegram ?? | Facebook ??
