Polkadot is optimizing its consensus model to scale its ecosystem and incorporate up to 1.000 parachains.
Currently, the Polkadot ecosystem supports a limit of 100 parachains, a number that will change significantly with the new update announced by the network developers.
In a blog postPolkadot introduced a new optimization called “Asynchronous Backing” that will significantly increase its scalability and performance. This optimization desynchronizes the growth of the Relay Chain from the growth of the parachains, making it possible to generate new blocks on the parachains from the oldest blocks on the main network, i.e. the Relay Chain.
Previously, the generation of new parachain blocks had to occur using the most recent blocks from the Polkadot main chain, so a new parachain block was proposed every two Relay Chain blocks. This was a drawback for greater scalability and efficiency in the network.
However, with the new optimization, collators, who are responsible for adding all new transactions to the network, can now propose multiple parachain blocks in each Relay Chain block, thus improving efficiency and increasing scalability.
An innovative solution to increase Polkadot's scalability and efficiency
The implementation of Asynchronous Backing on Polkadot brings with it many improvements to the network, including a 4x optimization in block space production, a 2x increase in throughput, a halving of parachain block time, and greater flexibility in block space scheduling. All of these improvements contribute to increased network efficiency when processing transactions and better allocation and utilization of block space, which developers can leverage to future-proof the network’s capabilities.
On the other hand, Polkadot highlighted that all these improvements also contribute to reducing costs and optimizing the user experience of decentralized applications (DApps) that are built on parachains. “Parachain blocks can be created and processed more frequently with asynchronous backup. With more transactions processed in less time, the overall user experience is improved,” the network said in the blog post.
Asynchronous Backing is the latest major optimization of the Polkadot network in its goal to maximize block space production natively. This is one of Polkadot’s core goals to build an ecosystem fit for Web3, one that does not pose limitations to the growth and expansion of the technology to all industries and does not sacrifice security or trust assumptions.
This new optimization will be implemented in phases on Polkadot, with an anticipated initial rollout on the Versi and Rococo testnets in the coming weeks.
A roadmap to scale to 1.000 parachains
During Polkadot’s developer conference, Polkadot Decoded 2023, Parity Technologies engineering lead Sophia Gold highlighted that optimizing Asynchronous Backing is part of the network’s roadmap to expand the number of parachains the network supports in its ecosystem to 1.000 and to scale transactions to over 1 million per second. “We know how to scale Polkadot for the indefinite future,” Gold said.
Parachains are independent layer-1 blockchains that run in parallel with the Polkadot mainnet and share its security, decentralization, and governance features.
Continue reading: Polkadot is the lowest energy consumption network in the crypto industry, according to a study
