W3F CMO: Polkadot arrives as the next generation of blockchain technology
This article is the speech of Christine Mohan, Chief Marketing Officer of Web3 Foundation, at Web3.0 Bootcamp on May 7th.
Christine introduced Polkadot’s mission, architecture, Web3 Foundation teams and Parity teams, as well as Polkadot ’s global ecosystem development and how to participate in Polkadot Network.
Hi everybody, I am Christine Mohan, CMO of Web3 Foundation. It is a great honor to participate in the opening ceremony of Web3.0 Bootcamp. Let me introduce myself first. I have 25 years of experience in software, digital media, adtech and blockchain. Before joining the W3F, I was the co-founder of Civil, a blockchain verification platform. Earlier, I had 11 years in PR, marketing and web operations at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Web3.0 Foundation believes in a fair and free decentralized internet where users control their own data, identity and destiny.
Technological breakthroughs do not happen overnight. Invented in 1903, the first airplanes were clunky, dangerous, and extremely impractical. Airlines (1919), airports (1928), and air traffic control (1930) facilitated the mass adoption of air travel and changed our lives forever. As a result, a multi-trillion $ industry was created. Blockchain technology is following the same pattern — evolving in stages, with the next step in its evolution laying the foundation to drive mass adoption.
If we look at the history of blockchain development, Bitcoin as the first ever blockchain, allowed for simple, currency-related applications. Ethereum integrated smart contract capabilities, causing a wave of more complex decentralized applications. Polkadot is the next generation of blockchain technology, connecting several chains together in a single network, allowing them to exchange data securely, and process transactions in parallel.
What makes this happen is a stellar founding team!
Dr. Gavin Wood, Polkadot co-founder, Web3.0 Foundation president, co-founder and CTO of Ethereum invented fundamental components of the blockchain industry, including Solidity, Proof-of-Authority consensus, and Whisper. He currently leads innovation on Polkadot, Kusama, and Substrate. Gavin coined the term Web 3.0 in 2014.
Robert Habermeier, Polkadot co-founder has a development background in blockchain, distributed systems and cryptography. As longtime member of the Rust community, Rob has focused on leveraging the language’s features to build highly parallel and performant solutions.
Peter Czaban, Polkadot co-founder, Web3 Foundation technology director has worked across defense, finance, and data analytics industries, working on mesh networks, distributed knowledge bases and quantitative pricing models.
The two high-powered organizations behind Polkadot are Web3.0 Foundation including a renowned research team. And Parity Technologies with 6 years of blockchain development experience.
First, let ’s take a closer look at the Web3.0 Foundation.
Web3 Foundation’s Research Team
Web3 Foundation Research is conducted by our in-house research team in Zug, Switzerland in collaboration with industrial projects and academic research groups. The team is composed of PhDs and experts in cryptography, security models, and messaging protocols; they work closely with the Parity development team in Berlin. Their main focus is areas relevant to decentralized systems:
● (Proveable) Security, Cryptography, and Privacy
● Decentralised Algorithms: Consensus and Optimization
● Cryptoeconomics and Game Theory
Web3.0 Foundation’s Adoption Team
Web3.0 Foundation’s Adoption Team is mainly responsible for communications, community and growth (such as the Polkadot Ambassador Program or Polkadot Pathways), and collaboration (finding partners, business development, etc.). The Adoption team work closely with the Technical Education team (who recently launched the Web3 MOOC), and the Grants team, responsible for grant review and distribution (more than 100 projects have been funded by W3F).
PolkaWorld interviewed the first group of official ambassadors of Polkadot in China recently to share why they chose Polkadot, how they became ambassadors, and what they have done in the community for Polkadot! This is just the beginning.
You can also see from our community map that we are a truly decentralized community with more than 4,000 members from 30 organizations and 23 countries from all over the world, but this in no way prevents us from being closely connected.
Also worth mentioning is the Pathways loyalty program, which is a project that allows community members to learn about Polkadot.
● Members work their way through different channels of content. Over 100 challenges created so far.
● Events channel: focuses on bringing community members from little knowledge of running industry events, through a set of challenges that prepare them to host their own Polkadot event.
● Education channel: focuses on Polkadot Basics. Members progress through each section of our wiki with quizzes and forums.
● Ecosystem channel: Web3.0 and Parity PR works with new grant teams or ecosystem partners to lead them from press releases to pitching.
Web3 Foundation’s Grant team
Now let me introduce the work of the W3F Grant team. Since 2018, the Foundation has distributed funds to more than 100 projects, 83 teams, and 24 new chains. Funded projects are in various modules of the Web3.0 ecosystem such as bridging, communication, finance, gaming, identity, interface, IoT, privacy, robotics, scaling, social networking, storage, supply chain, tooling, technical improvement, and wallets.
Polkadot is designed to work with public, private and enterprise chains. We are excited to support a growing cohort of projects to develop critical use cases: Centifuge, Plasm, Edgeware, Acala, Laminar, Celer, Darwinia, Chainlink, ChainX, etc.
We work with projects to achieve, announce, and promote their milestones. Recent announcements include:
IoT App Nodle Moves From Stellar Blockchain to Polkadot
Shyft Network to Build FATF-Compliant ‘Identity Layer’ for Polkadot
Acala and Chainlink Collaborate to Power DeFi on Polkadot
Web3.0 Foundation and Parity host weekly Crowdcast webinars with grantees and partners. You can sign up for notifications at Crowdcast.io.
The launch of Polkadot is also underway, with plans to be online by the end of May. We are progressing carefully, from PoA, nomination of proof of stake, governance, removal of sudo runtime, enabling balance transfer, to enabling core functions.
The Architecture of Polkadot
Here you can take a brief look at the architecture of Polkadot. The Relay Chain and parachains have a number of actors:
- The Relay Chain is a simple chain which focuses on coordinating parachains (shards) where most of the user-facing work takes place. It’s a nominated proof-of-stake (NPoS) chain with a hybrid consensus.
- Parachains are “parallelizable blockchains” that make Polkadot a network.
- Parathreads are merely parachains that do not stay connected to the relay chain. Instead they bid on a per-block basis to be included.
Participating Roles
Finally, let’s take a brief look at the participating roles and their definitions in Polkadot：
- Validators are the staked entities that secure the Relay Chain and verify new parachain blocks.
- Collators are the block producers of parachains. They package the transactions and hand off the PoV blocks to validators to verify.
- Fishermen are nodes with small stakes, watching one or more parachains, ensuring that a collator is performing honestly.
We are thrilled to welcome you as the first cohort of the Web 3.o Bootcamp and look forward to following your growth and accomplishments!
Get Involved
Run a node or nominate a validator：Node management、Nomination Guide
Use the web-based application to perform network tasks：Polkadot user interface
Become a builder or network maintainer：Builder’s Portal、Network Maintainers
See the governance proposals and validator dashboard：Polkassembly、Polkastats
Visit the Polkadot’s block explorer：Polkascan、Subscan
Check the list and map of all running nodes：Telemetry user interface
Learn more：New Polkadot Lightpaper
Twitter: @christinemohan
Follow us on Twitter：@polkaworld_org
