Plaza is billed as a new Polkadot parachain system that will bundle the features and functionality of parachains into one chain, serving as a hub for liquidity and applications.
Rob Habermeier, co-founder of Polkadot and presenter of Plaza, argues that Polkadot's set of sidechains, known as parachains, has fragmented and dispersed usability, which is why he considers it necessary to build a new blockchain that unifies the functionalities of the sidechains and contributes to the scalability of the entire blockchain ecosystem.
Plaza, Habermeier explained, will be a system parachain that operates on top of the relay chain. The new chain’s design incorporates innovative features that will address several of Polkadot’s existing challenges, such as smart contract support, which is crucial for the programmability of assets on the chain.
Plaza's development is also focused on simplifying the user experience by eliminating the need to manage their assets across multiple blockchains. For developers, the process of building new protocols and applications will also be simplified, reducing development time and associated costs.
Thus, Habermeier emphasized that the new Plaza blockchain will serve as a hub for Polkadot users, developers, liquidity, and decentralized applications.
Plaza, Polkadot's new central hub
According to Habermeier, Plaza represents the evolution of the AssetHub parachain system and could become the new central hub for Polkadot.
“This system chain would be an evolution of the current AssetHub chain… The proposal is to consolidate all the following features into a single system parachain, to evolve from AssetHub and take it to the maximum possible scale”, said.
The new network will bundle key features of parachains, from the On-chain asset issuance and support, going through the smart contract functionality and the Staking integrationUntil the chain bridges, custody and swaps, all with the goal of minimizing fragmentation, offering a more simplified experience, and driving scalability.
In addition to the above, the Polkadot co-founder also highlighted that Plaza could integrate other parachain functionalities that are fundamental to building the Web3 ecosystem, such as digital identity and the decentralized governance.
Although these are not core functionalities in Plaza, Habermeier identified enormous potential in them to improve system automation and expand Polkadot's use cases, which is why they are considered key inclusions in the proposal for the new system parachain.
Scalability, decentralization and security
Several blockchain industry experts have praised Habermeier's proposal for scaling the Polkadot network.
Web3 Foundation educator Filippo Franchini, projection the differences of the new Plaza parachain system with the technologies used by other ecosystems such as Ethereum and Solana. Franchini emphasized the “coherent and synchronous” environment that Plaza will provide and that will allow users and developers to do whatever they want on the network, from implementing smart contracts to creating composable applications and much more. Likewise, X user @mrkusama commented that Plaza’s development will combine key features that will make Polkadot an easier and simpler network to use, so it could compete with blockchains directly focused on scalability such as Solana.
For now, Habermeier submitted Plaza's proposal individually, as a participant in Polkadot's governance, so the proposal still needs to be discussed by developers and the blockchain's crypto community for approval and development.
Main image from Digital Report
