a more comprehensive look at Polkadot

It is highly recommended to read Polkadot( basics ) first.

table of contents

click to jump to where you want

• Objects
• Tokenomics
• Protocol

Objects

We introduced about main objects of Polkadot briefly in last article, today we’re gonna look deeper into objects including parathreads and bridges.

Parachains

Parachains are chains that are attached to the relay chain, it can be a blockchain, a smart contract chain, privacy chain, and so on.

Parachains are maintained by collators, collators collect information which is going to attach to this parachain, and they provide candidate blocks to the relay chain validators. Parachains are not required to have their own native token, neither are they restricted to have one.

Polkadot provides 100 parachain slot, there are three types of objects to be allocated.

• Common good parachains
  • parachain slots reserved for functionality that benefits the the ecosystem as a whole
  • the governance system decide whether to allocate or not
• Auction parachains
  • these parachains gain slot by participating in an auction
  • two period candle auction( here )
• Parathreads
  • described below

Parathreads

Parathreads are parachains that are temporarily participate in Polkadot security without needing to lease a dedicated parachain slot. In fact, parachain is like paying the rent of a slot, parathreads is like paying for the producing of blocks. You can see it as a pay-as-you-go parachain .

Parathread is for those who does not need the whole use of a parachain but needs the participation of the shared security of Polkadot, they bid for the production of blocks ( it is kind of like paying gas fee to make your transactions included in Bitcoin ).