Polkadot Launches Parachains
The first five parachains went live on Polkadot over the weekend. This weekend, Polkadot achieved a new milestone in its roadmap for increasing the scalability of its network. The first parachains—run by Acala Network, Moonbeam, Parallel Finance, Astar, and Clover—went live on the Polkadot network. A parachain is a kind of individual, sovereign blockchain running on top of Polkadot. Polkadot aims for efficiency so that transactions dont compete against all other smart contracts in the same ecosystem. Parachains also mitigate the need for networks to rely on layer-2 scaling solutions to reduce congestion. In simple words, it is as if your favorite decentralized application had a blockchain of its own. This is why Polkadot is defined as a “Layer Zero” protocol: parachains would be the actual layer 1 blockchains (like Bitcoin or Ethereum) running in parallel over a common backbone. Initially, Polkadot will offer support for 100 parachains. Allocations will be made through auctions that will guarantee a slot for up to 96 weeks. The next auction will be held on December 23, 2021, when six new parachains will be allocated. The official launch of parachains is the culmination of a developer effort followed enthusiastically by the community. Shortly after Polkadot developers announced the successful deployment