Polkadot are participating in the Spring 2021 ChainLink Hackathon. The event is focused on innovating in the process of building the next generation of smart contracts. Users will be able to bring smart contract apps to life, win prizes from top web3 projects, and further participants can join the community for mentorship and support.
All of these are happening to innovate the best technology which will help harness the power of off-chain data and thus participants will be able to build and showcase any kind of innovative DeFi, NFT, Gaming or universally connected dApp, which users can use in the industry’s leading oracle network.
Anyone from anywhere in the world can participate in the event and Polkadot are a part of the event.
Polkadot is all about parachain. Those who do not understand parachain should know that a parachain is an application-specific data structure which is globally coherent and validated by Polkadot‘s validators. There is a CoinMarketCap content about everything parachains. Those who are just getting used to parachains should understand the characteristics like specialization and flexibility, scalability and Interoperability, use cases, slot leasing, fees and cost.
The idea of parachains is to provide for maximum number of potential use cases through their layer-1 blockchains. Several projects have already expressed their interest to bring parachains and they cover for several use cases like Decentralized Finance (DeFi), gaming, digital wallets, credentials, identity verification, oracles (price feeds), smart contracts, and internet of things.
For clarity, projects which wish to run as a parachain on Polkadot should lease a slot on the Relay Chain by winning a parachain slot auction. The auction bids to lease a slot are placed using DOT if the slots are claimed in Polkadot and KSM in case of Kusama.
Teams that place their auction lock up the amount of DOT that they bid for the duration of the chosen lease period and after the lease period the full amount is unlocked.
It is also important to understand the parathread model, parathreads are the parachains which connect to the Polkadot using a pay-as-you-go model as opposed to leasing a parachain slot. This model is particularly useful for those projects which do not require continuous connectivity to the network.
Also, the interesting thing is that the blockchains on the Polkadot will be able to switch between parachains and parathreads based on their requirements based on their needs and on availability of parachain slots on the Relay Chain.
