| Titles | Focus areas | Excerpts | Authors | Publication |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Polkadot: Vision for a heterogeneous multi-chain framework (Whitepaper) |
Pooled security, Trust-free interchain transactability, Relay chain operations, Parachain validation |
“Polkadot is a scalable heterogeneous multi-chain. This means that unlike previous blockchain implementations which have focused on providing a single chain of varying degrees of generality over potential applications, Polkadot itself is designed to provide no inherent application functionality at all. Rather, Polkadot provides the bedrock “relay-chain” upon which a large number of validatable, globally-coherent dynamic data-structures may be hosted side-by-side. We call these data-structures “parallelised” chains or parachains, though there is no specific need for them to be blockchain in nature.” |
Gavin WOOD | 2016 |
| XCMP | HRMP channels, XCMP channels, XCMP authentication |
“XCMP is Polkadot’s cross-chain message-passing protocol. It allows one parachain to send messages to another parachain and provides guarantees about the delivery of these messages. Polkadot allows parachains to send each other mesages as long as they have established messaging channels with each other.” |
Alistair STEWART, Fatemeh SHIRAZI (minor), Leon GROOT BRUINDERINK (minor) |
2019/12 |
| Availability and Validity of Data in Sharded Blockchains |
Light client validators, Relay chain committees, Shared security |
“AnV is a blockchain sharding scheme through which a single beacon (relay chain) can validate numerous shard chains, with true shared security, minimal latency, good liveness, and relative efficiency in terms of computation, network, and storage.” |
Jeffrey BURDGES, Handan KILINÇ ALPER, Alistair STEWART |
2020/02 |
| Web3 Foundation Polkadot Runtime Security Assessment |
Source code analysis, Configuration and Architecture review, Attack simulation and Breach modelling, Network protocol analysis |
“Overall, the Substrate and Polkadot layers were found to be free from traditional classes of vulnerabilities and were difficult to disrupt or subvert via exploitation of injection, corruption, and permissions issues. The use of Rust greatly reduced the likelihood of many classes of attack. Rust is a programming language that is focused on safety above all else, while still being high-performance.” |
Atredis Partners | 2020/02 |
| A verifiably secure and proportional committee election rule |
Proportional justified representation (PJR), Sybil resistance, Phragmms |
“Our work is motivated by an application on blockchains that implement Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPoS), where the community must elect a committee of validators to participate in its consensus protocol, and where fighting overrepresentation protects the system against attacks by an adversarial minority.” |
Alfonso CEVALLOS, Alistair STEWART |
2020/04 |
| Polkadot: Token Economics |
NPoS payments & inflation, Transaction fees, Treasury |
“We therefore aim at having a considerable percentage of the total DOT supply be staked by validators and nominators. Another large percentage of the DOT supply will be frozen as deposits by the commercial blockchains who get a parachain slot. We originally aim to have around 50% of DOTs staked in NPoS, and 30% in parachain deposits.” |
Alfonso CEVALLOS, Jonas GERHLEIN |
2020/05 |
| Interoperability: Where are we now and what can we expect for 2021? |
Blockchain consensus, Transaction history, Centralised and Decentralised worlds |
“Interoperability will make connected blockchains effectively one ecosystem, reducing the costs of lock-in when deciding which chain to use. True interoperability would allow assets on one chain to derive value from being used on another and applications on different chains to interact.” |
Fatemeh SHIRAZI | 2021/01 |
| Non-monetary incentives for council members |
Governance participation, Staking behaviour, Gamification |
“The current advances in technologies surrounding Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) can be utilized as an additional incentive layer for council member’s engagement and participation. NFTs as tool can be perfectly combined with insights from the academic literature about the concept of “gamification” to foster engagement and reward good behavior.” |
Jonas GERHLEIN | 2021/04 |
| Nominating and validator selection on Polkadot |
Staking, Elections, Trust |
“To motivate nominators to select only suitable and trustworthy validators, they share the same consequences as their validators. That means that they get rewarded for the validator’s good behavior and fined (“slashed”) for bad behavior. These key concepts ensure that, by the wisdom of the crowd and market forces, the nominators contribute to securing the network by curating the active set of validators. The votes of nominators can thereby be regarded as affirmations of the credibility of the respective validators.” |
Jonas GERHLEIN | 2021/07 |
| Front-Running, Smart Contracts, and Candle Auctions |
Random-termination, Shill bidding |
“Front-running opportunities arise in blockchain auctions because any new bid that is entered into the (peer-to-peer) network securing the blockchain becomes public among network members almost instantaneously. Yet, a bid counts for the auction’s outcome only after it is included in a new block. The problem is that new blocks are appended to the chain at discrete intervals only. Together with the permissionless nature of blockchain networks this gives tech-savvy bidders an opportunity window to inspect and react to the bids of other bidders before a new block is produced.” |
Samuel HÄFNER, Alistair STEWART |
2021/08 |
| Titles | Focus areas | Excerpts | Authors | Publication |