The Polkadot-connected organisation Parity Technologies опубликовала an overview of the project’s roadmap. The team is preparing the first set of major optimisations to the consensus protocol since its launch in December 2021.
The developers are focusing on areas including scalability, interoperability and connectivity between parachains, governance of the Relay Chain, staking, and bridges to other ecosystems.
Asynchronous Backing
Asynchronous backing will shorten block production time from 12 to 6 seconds, accelerating finality of transactions on parachains.
The update also contemplates increasing block space by five to ten times and adding the ability to reuse blocks that did not make it onto the Relay Chain on the first attempt.
According to the developers, this update will increase network throughput in total to 100 000-1 000 000 TPS without compromising security.
Asynchronous backing will be prepared for deployment on Kusama this year. After testing and audits — on Polkadot.
Parathreads
Another innovation will be parathreads — parachains with pay-as-you-go usage. The solution will allow developers not to wait for parachain auctions, upload project code to the Relay Chain and launch several collators. In the future, parathreads can be upgraded to parachains if involved in and win auctions.
The solution could be evaluated by hackathon participants and project development teams.
The initiative aims to lower barriers to joining the Polkadot ecosystem. Work on creating parathreads will be completed in the first to second quarters of 2023.
Going forward, both parachains and parathreads will be able to optimize the resources used by the consensus to align with their requirements.
XCM
XCM messaging system, which provides connectivity between different parallel blockchains in the ecosystem, developers presented in May.
Weights V2
Weights V2 will optimize Substrate transactions and operations in the context of block loading. This concept will introduce the notion of multi-dimensional weights that measure not only execution time but also the amount of state available for a given operation. The innovation will simplify writing parachains and rollups on Substrate. The solution is expected to be ready by mid-October 2022.
Governance
The second version of the governance system will push toward maximal decentralisation of decision-making processes governing Polkadot’s development. The update will remove the Council and Technical Committees, introduce a grants program and move every proposal under consideration to community referenda. All actions such as voting, submitting improvement proposals and delegating will be unrestricted.
The new governance system is planned to be deployed on Kusama in early Q4 2022 (likely alongside a runtime update to v0.9.30).
Parathreads for Public Good
This type of parachain will serve as a platform for various teams to maintain the network. The first will be Polkadot Alliance, a public initiative to create a network body to safeguard fair use of the Polkadot brand and open-source code. Launch expected by the end of October.
Bridge Hubs
Parity’s team has been working on the Polkadot-Kusama bridge for some time, in addition to Snowfork and Centrifuge initiatives.
The bridge, expected to launch by the end of the year, will be a message routing service within each network. In other words, it will not store state data about assets held in the bridge (for example wrapped assets), but will forward messages to other parachains for processing.
Nominations Pools and Fast Unbonding
Nomination pools will broaden the circle of potential staking participants — users will be able to create staking pools with open access for others.
Since the option appeared in June on Kusama, the number of such pools has reached 64.
In Polkadot, nomination pools will be introduced from version 0.9.28. The community will be invited to set configuration parameters before their implementation at the blockchain level.
There are no technical limits on their number or the number of participants.
In the future, developers plan to add a fast unstaking feature. This will facilitate the transition of nominators who do not receive rewards to nomination pools.
Staking Dashboard
The dashboard will simplify users’ tasks of studying and selecting validators, as well as monitoring staking yields.
The dashboard uses light client technology, allowing users to avoid interacting with infrastructure intermediaries such as Infura.
The dashboard is in beta testing. A full version launch is expected in the near future
Disputed Slashing
Since the Polkadot launch, validators have had time to configure software to avoid slashing once such a function begins to operate at the code level.
Going forward, those who submit invalid blocks will be fined up to the size of their entire stake. Those who produce erroneous blocks — to hinder spam — will face sanctions of a small amount. This will significantly raise the network’s economic security overall. The feature is expected to be implemented by the end of this year.
Earlier in June 2022, the project team announced plans to change the governance structure in June 2022.
XCM messaging system, which provides connectivity between different parallel blockchains in the ecosystem, developers presented in May.
Earlier, the USDT issuer announced support for the Polkadot blockchain.
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