Polkadot, a prominent player in the blockchain ecosystem, has made a significant move by expanding its parachain limit to 100. With the Asynchronous update, Polkadot’s block production time will be halved, and the block data area will significantly increase. This important development will enable the ecosystem to support more parachains and transactions in the future. Parity Technologies announced that it will join Asynchronous’s Rococo testnet, and the mainnet launch date will be shaped based on the success of the testnet.
A Major Step for Polkadot
Polkadot, known for its technological advancements and housing multiple blockchain networks, has set a new goal. According to this goal, Polkadot’s core developers aim to expand the existing limit of 100 parachains. With the help of software updates, it is expected that 1000 parachains will be integrated into the ecosystem in the future.
The update called Asynchronous represents a step further in Polkadot’s parachain consensus protocol than other updates. With the update, the block production time in the Polkadot ecosystem will decrease from 12 seconds to 6 seconds, and the block data area will be increased by 5 to 10 times for each block. Sophia Gold, the Engineering Lead of the team, stated:
“Asynchronous support provides flexible timing for our future scalability efforts through asynchronous support, elastic scaling, and real-time transaction time. We have a reliable roadmap to enable Polkadot to support 1,000 parachains per second and over 1 million transactions. We know how to scale Polkadot for an uncertain future.”
How Will the Process Work?
During the sub0 developer conference in Lisbon, Asynchronous support version was announced to be included in Polkadot’s Rococo testnet and tested within approximately two weeks by Parity Technologies, one of the leading software support companies in the Polkadot ecosystem. The mainnet launch will be determined based on the success of the trials conducted on the testnet, and the timeline remains uncertain for now.
The working principle of the Polkadot ecosystem is based on a central blockchain network called the Relay Chain. Through transactions carried out on this central network, interconnected sub-blockchain networks called parachains can also operate.
Sophia Gold also added that with the Asynchronous update, Polkadot will increase its validator count by more than three times by the end of 2024, reaching approximately 1,000. She described this as the most significant evolution of the parachain consensus since the launch of parachains nearly two years ago.
