Gavin Wood Says Parachains Virtually Ready to Launch on Polkadot

Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood has suggested in a recent interview that parachains are “technologically” ready to launch on his sharded blockchain protocol Polkadot, and it is now down to the platform’s governance process to set that in motion. Parachains are highly customizable layer-1 blockchains that run in parallel on Polkadot, connected to the shared security of the layer-0 central Relay Chain, and can include their own economies and native tokens. The long-awaited parachain rollout marks the final piece of the core functionality for the project to be delivered, realizing the multi-chain architecture of both Polkadot and its sister network Kusama. Kusama Parachain Success Clears Path for Polkadot As the canary network and live proving ground for Polkadot’s technology and functionality, Kusama cleared the path for Polkadot’s parachains following a governance vote in June to commence the auction process of slot leases to add parachains to Kusama. A schedule for the first batch of five separate Kusama parachain auctions was then set between June and July, with each auction lasting 7 days. All slot auction bids were cast by crowdloans for the full duration leasing period, meaning the prospective parachain projects leveraged support from the decentralized community of KSM token holders for their bids, incentivized via project tokens or other rewards. Promisingly, 80% of prospective Kusama parachain projects, responding to an a...