At Polkadot, it is all about chain builders.  For clarity, chain builders are those who are participating in the Rococo V1 test network.

Parity Technologies along with the Polkadot community maintains the Rococo public testnet.  The purpose of a public testnet is to help the users to get used to the technological product and user environment. It is a lot like a testing playground.  The public testnet is of great interest to master node owners, developers and future clients.  The test run is important when making changes in the blockchain network in a way to avoid breaking the main blockchain.

In the testnet users will be able to identify the weak points and vulnerabilities in the environment.

The object of the Rococo V1 test network is to test the “Parachains Consensus Process.”  This is also used to test the “Parachains which is built by the community” and also the “interactions” with each other in the Polkadot Ecosystem.

For clarity, each Parachain is application specific.  Every parachain has the potential to be a blockchain in itself, but it need not actually be one.

To improve the quality of the different apps, it is not uncommon to see different parachains getting updated with upgrades and then getting restarted.  This process is unavoidable for the overall well-being of the network.  New parachains get added by chain builders as the network functions stably.  Thus, improving different features and functionality.

Previously, Rococo V0 was launched and now Rococo V1 is gaining perspective.  The V1 is the production ready code for the consensus.  The difference between V0 and V1 is about the way the parachains get included. Thus, the goal is to ensure that the “extensibility of the Polkadot ecosystem” is efficient making it easy for chain builders to onboard to the ecosystem.

Polkadot Backward Iteration

There will be periodic restart of the V1 just like V0 to ensure that backward incompatible changes are put in place to help the dev team to iterate faster over the parachain based API leading to earlier launch of the parachain functionality on the Polkadot and the Kusama Network.

Those who register on the Rococo will take to a commitment of running at least one validator node of Rococo and also to run at least one collator of the registered Parachain.

Those who are looking to stay committed as validators are required to contact the element channel for running a validator node. With time Polkadot will need teams to maintain more of validator nodes.