Polkadot has the ability to support several execution slots. Also, while parachains have a dedicated slot for their chain, parathreads share slots amongst a particular group.
To all those members in the community, who are asking about the progress of work on the project like why is there not any feedback from the developer, no information about the progress of work, no dates, deadlines and them wondering if is it a problem to answer questions?
The answer is that it is not possible to put a timeline on a new innovation. The price has already taken off and it is important to be patient and grateful that we know about Polkadot before billions of others.
Those who are not very clear about the architecture of Polkadot it is important to know that Polkadot is a heterogeneous multi-chain with shared security and interoperability.
There is a Relay Chain, which is the central chain of Polkadot. Also, all validators of Polkadot are staked on the Relay chain in DOT and they validate for the Relay Chain.
The Relay Chain is made up of relatively smaller numbers of transaction types, which include methods to interact with the governance mechanism, the parachain auctions, and participation in NPoS.
The Relay Chain has the responsibility to coordinate the system including the parachains as a whole. The Relay chain does not have major functionality and it does not support smart contracts. Parachains have other specific tasks delegated, which have varied implementations and features.
Most of the execution slots take place by way of parachains and parathread slots. For clarity, Parachains have a dedicated slot (core) for their chain and it works like a process, which runs constantly. Also, the Parathreads share the slots amongst a group and are therefore more like processes, which should be woken up and run less frequently.
Various use cases will be handled by specific parachain or parathread implementations. Polkadot does not place any kind of limitation over what parachains will be able to do apart from the fact that they need to be able to generate a proof which can be validated by the validators which are assigned to the parachain.
Some of the parachains are specific to a particular application and others focus on particular features like privacy, scalability, smart contracts, privacy or smart contracts.
The roles on the Polkadot ecosystem are like validators, collators, and nominators. It helps to check in to the video overview of the architecture of Polkadot, particularly the whiteboard interview with W3F researcher Alistair Stewart for more clarity for those who are interested.
