The Promised Lands: 1M TPS, 1K parachains interop seamlessly under the same shared security.

A road to these lands is now built. A 2-year wait ends. Polkadot's next-gen upgrades queue for launch, set to pass through governance.

• Async backing hits KSM.
• BEEFY merges with DOT.
• KSM <-> DOT connects, reaching ETH’s shores.
• Freeing ETH’s liquidity. Providing Data Availability to rollups.
• Problems elsewhere? Non-problems in Polkadot.
• The silver lining, these updates will solve bottlenecks for others too.

(5 min Reading Time)

The Nitty-Gritty:

Async Backing:

• Execution time jumps from 0.5s to 2s. Block space production x4.
• Block times halve from 12s to 6s. Throughput x2.
• Result? An 8x performance spike for parachains, no trade-offs in security or decentralization.

Impact:

• Polkadot scales up. More than today’s industry needs. Aiming for 1000 validators, 200 cores/(old jargon:parachain slots).
• Multiple relay chains? Possible now. If needed. Async backing is the groundwork for future scaling optimizations. It’s not only about more cores. It’s just smarter and efficient: bundling tasks across chains in a same core for atomic execution. Distributing tasks from one chain over various cores.

Coming Soon:

•Agile Core Time: Flexibility in Polkadot’s resource use. Pay as you go, or go big with bulk purchases of core time/blockspace. More details in my pancake thread.

•Blockspace Market: A bazaar of needs and surpluses. Trade what you need or don’t need. #OnlyPossibleOnPolkadot

Looking Ahead:

•Elastic Scaling: Parachains get a speed boost. Block times drop to 2s. Producing 3 blocks where there was 1. This efficiency demands more cores, more eyes/validators. Chains will be able to utilize multiple Polkadot cores, seamlessly managing constant high traffic or sudden surges.

Just look at Mythical Games’s shift from Ethereum to Polkadot – #1 gaming chain, top 4 blockchain of all by monthly digital asset sales.

Why MeWe chooses Polkadot to onboard its 20M users on-chain?

Why bet on Polkadot?

Why skip the easy path?

Why not follow the vibes into multisig landscape?

The Big Picture:

These updates are a testament to Polkadot's potential to push to support 1M TPS and 1K chains with massive throughput capacity.

A testament to the next-gen projects.

A testament to the adaptability for unforeseeable future needs.

A testament to those tinkerers who see crypto beyond its current bubble.

This showcases Polkadot solved sharding. Proves its design’s scalability well beyond today’s need without making tradeoffs; security and decentralization.

And still stays cyberpunk.

BEEFY?

Simply put,

Smaller Proofs -> Less Computation -> Cryptographic Proofs Usage-> Trustless ETH <> DOT

BEEFY builds on the existing GRANDPA finality gadget/proofs—a key reason that drew projects like Avail, Madara, Cardano, and Bittensor to PolkadotSDK.

GRANDPA’s limitation, though, is its need for full chain headers, resulting in larger proofs and higher costs. Bottlenecking possibility of trustless bridges to Polkadot. Sure, this isn’t an issue for bridging b/w ecosystems with inexpensive blockspace, like Cosmos. But wasn’t possible for bridging <> ETH.

Now, BEEFY comes in. And so what?

BEEFY was the missing puzzle piece. Holding Polkadot back for 2 years. Siloing it. Now, it will first unite the DotSama family KSM <>DOT.

Expect to see bridging governance actions b/t KSM and DOT.

Expect liquidity of DOT inflows to KSM. Allowing tinkerers there to experiment again.

Expect a portion of DOT from treasury to be given to KSM treasury.

Expect Snowbridge to debut soon leveraging BEEFY. Potentially channeling Ethereum’s vast liquidity directly into Polkadot. Enabling trustless, decentralized, general-purpose bridges.

No reliance on human.

No committees.

No multisigors.

Just solid code. Cryptography. Cryptoeconomics.

How?

BEEFY brings finality from Polkadot, verifying parachain messages at low costs.

Ensures that the state and txs from Polkadot are finalized and irreversible.

On the Ethereum side, Snowbridge includes a BEEFY light client.

The Ethereum Gateway contract uses this to validate and execute Polkadot’s verified, finalized txs. Instead of committees and multisigors, Snowbridge relies on BEEFY’s randomly picked validators, whose signatures get thoroughly verified. Providing a very high confidence level in the validity of cross-chain txs.

Polkadot’s on-chain governance, free from any centralized control, oversees BEEFY’s updates and operations, indirectly having control in how Snowbridge functions.

Polkadot lending its strengths to Ethereum’s challenges?

Issues:

Network congestion. Scaling. Inefficient and expensive blockspace allocation. Expensive DA. Fight for fee system. No bridge standardization. Smart contract risks.

Current solutions:

Rollup everything -> trade off decentralization initially for the sake of scaling first.

ZK everything, like a madman.

Multisig everything for UX.

Potential solutions:

Shared sequencers, AA, enshrined rollups, EIP-4844, Danksharding.

Within Polkadot’s design, these potential solutions are already baked in its protocol, not afterthoughts.

Fact is fact. Ethereum has become the ultimate rollup and liquidity hub, fueled by first-mover advantage, adoption, VC money, and network effects. Yet, this rollup-centric future will not allow it being a bridge hub.

Today’s bridging. Bad UX. End users mostly use multisig bridges. Just in 3 years, hackers filched over $2.5B.

And this rollup-centric path is fraught with deep bumps and fat tail risks. It lacks standardization, leads to fragmentation, and leans on smart contract fidelity. Decentralization even takes a backseat as scaling takes the wheel, crafting a land ruled by multisigs.

Mostly, for LP providers and users, the stakes are high.

We have Optimistic (ORU) and ZK rollups (ZKR).

ORU provides more computation but longer finality period. ORU <> ZKR. Almost impossible. Thereby, multisigs step in, hastening finality.

Canonical bridges? Who’d wait 7 days for a transfer?

Shared sequencers? A maybe. Sth very similar to what Polkadot already doing with its parachains, collators, and relay chain.

ZKR? High cost for on-chain verification.

Risc0 ZETH? Brings an external service on top of Ethereum’s security. Provides validity checks. Promising. But again hits the wallet hard. Demands a computer powerhouse for one proof.

ORU produces a block every 2s. Bridging them with ZK. NGMI. Therefore today’s ZKR behaves more Optimistic than ZK.

Polkadot steps up here. Solved and battle tested the issues of others what they can’t.

You can combine the Polkadot cores.

Run a rollup over several cores.

You have the bandwidth for heavy-duty computation.

Chop and process blocks in parallel, every 2s.

Validate these rollup blocks, akin to a ZK circuiting, minus the hefty price tag.

But first ETH and DOT have to talk. BEEFY’s the key here, making dialogue possible without a need of a translator.

Hyperbridge by PolytopeLabs, integrates a complete Beacon chain light client, validating Ethereum’s full validator set, not just a subset like other solutions do. By leveraging BEEFY, using one core of Polkadot for full-scale validation. And securing this communication by Polkadot’s $5B stake.

Again.

No multisigs.

No trust assumptions.

No committees in between.

No subsets. #OnlyPossibleOnPolkadot

And Polkadot gains demand by this. From the core time used for doing these processes and the computation. Win. Win.

More details on this -> in the great interviews of seunlanlege by TEACHMEDEFI and TheKusamarian.

Data Availability?

Ethereum’s rollup-centric strategy hits a bandwidth wall. It can’t handle all the rollup data. Expensive. So once monolithic. Today modular-wannabe.

EIP4844? Just a one-hit wonder. Potential fix? Waiting on Danksharding. Wen? Vague.

But now, we have Celestia and Avail, hosting rollup data on their chains.

Polkadot, though, has already had Data Availability (DA) protocols for over 5 years. Each parachain block is erasure-coded and available to every relay chain validator. They can piece it back together. DAS? Re-execution of blocks? All possible.

The co-founder of Polkadot is cooking a secret project, Sugondat, that aims to use Polkadot’s idle cores to provide DA for other ecosystem chains. Hyperbridge collabs in here as well, linking these resources to other chains/rollups.

Think about it: harnessing each Polkadot core for collective computing power. That’s how Polkadot outperforms any other DA solution, thanks to its sharded execution and solid $5B security.

The promise?

The most efficient, powerful, and safe DA service for rollups and more, handling storage, and processing like no other can do. #OnlyPossibleOnPolkadot

Closure:

So, can we spot the dark horse now?

Or are we still enchanted by the showhorses everyone admires?

Look closer, see them burdened, growing heavier, inching closer each day to a pace it can’t sustain. We do need the showhorses though, for the show must go on. But when the music stops, the dark horse will have to take the lead.