There's a reason Polkadot has solidified itself in the top 10 in 2021.
It's all in the family.
Polkadot and its massive ecosystem have approached blockchain
in a unique unconventional fashion,
and it goes to show that there's strength in numbers.
Simply put,
DOT is the hub of the wheel and its ecosystem are the spokes.
This creative approach to scalability and interoperability
has kept this family rolling on the highway toward blockchain prosperity.
John Steinbeck once said,
"People don't take trips. Trips take people."
So let's pack our bags and see what's up with Polkadot and Kusama.
Let's get it!
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My name is Ben.
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In this video,
we will discuss Polkadot, Kusama, as well as some other notable projects
in the DOT family that have potential to end Q4 with a bang.
In the spirit of the holidays,
for this video,
I want you to think of the entire blockchain ecosystem as one big family.
The patriarch of the family is old grandpa Bitcoin.
He's a strong leader,
and that's why he makes a lot of the big decisions for the rest of the family.
Although he can make everybody grumpy when he's below $50K,
his kids always look to him for advice when they don't know when to go up or down.
When it gets dark,
his baby alts help him carry red candles down the hill
by the forest to help feed the bears.
They even walk up the hill with him by the green pastures
so they can lure the bulls into the chute to prepare for the rodeo.
Grandpa looks good in chaps.
He used to be a cowboy.
He's made some risky decisions
and has hundreds of children and grandchildren.
That's why grandma over there lives over the river and through the woods.
Before they divorced,
three of their kids, Vitalik, Charles and Gavin,
all had an affinity for mathematics and applied sciences.
In their younger years,
they all put their heads together trying to one-up their father
and created Ethereum.
As most of you already know,
every family has its own set of drama.
For better or for worse, the trio split up.
Vitalik stayed with ETH,
Charles created Cardano,
and Gavin Wood created Polkadot.
They all have their pros and cons,
and if you leave market cap out of the discussion,
focus mainly on functionality,
it's tough to debate who's better than the other.
ETH and ADA are both respectable layer 1 protocols,
but Gavin Wood took his time to think outside the box
when creating Polkadot.
His goal was to make Polkadot a layer 0 solution
that focuses in on operability, scalability and security.
Instead of overloading the mainnet and letting the congestion slow speeds
and to cause higher gas fees,
Gavin's vision was to distribute the workload through the rest of the ecosystem
so his family works together efficiently and securely at scale.
Gavin's sharded proof-of-stake protocol,
parachains,
which are separate chains that run parallel to the mainnet,
intelligently communicate with each other
in order to validate nodes and exchange information for the Relay Chain.
The Relay Chain, or what Polkadot calls their mainnet,
allows transactions from all chains in the network at the same time.
This was meticulously designed to promote cross-chain communication,
transparent governance,
and because of the design,
it's easy to update.
Unlike many others,
there does not need to be a hardfork to update Polkadot.
Also, unlike many others,
Polkadot has a cousin, a canary sidechain known as Kusama
that acts as an active testnet to experiment new ideas with.
Kusama is like that one cousin you only see at Christmas
that uses fingers to make sure your Gorilla Glue works.
Since many blockchains don't have a testnet,
let alone an active one,
they cannot take unnecessary chances to try out new radical ideas.
Kusama embraces the chaos with style.
It has the numbers to back it up.
On January 1 of this year,
KSM traded for just under $70.
In a short amount of time,
it went on a parabolic run to its May 18 all-time high of $606.
Currently No. 57 by market cap,
trading for $366 per coin,
with a market cap of $3.2 billion.
The latest run-up to $512 on November 7
was due to the anticipation of the parachain auction hype.
Not to mention Bitcoin was also above $60K.
Keep in mind, unless your name is SAND,
all of the alts always follow grandpa Bitcoin.
Kusama, DOT and Bitcoin have all corrected since the second week of November,
but that doesn't necessarily mean there's not time left for the bulls to have a rodeo.
Price action for DOT this year has almost been as wild as Kusama's.
Can you believe that on January 1, DOT was trading for just under $9?
It ran to $45 in May,
corrected to around $11 in July
and reached new all-time high just over $53 on November 7.
In the past month, DOT has corrected roughly 26% to $36.
The time grandpa Bitcoin wakes up from his nap,
seeing DOT back over $50 wouldn't surprise me the least bit.
In fact, maybe not this cycle but in due time,
seeing a $100 DOT and a $1,000 KSM is inevitable.
Right now, there are several reasons I'm so bullish on DOT
and its ever growing family.
Yes, Binance.US recently announced you can now trade DOT on their exchange,
but honestly,
the real excitement lies in the parachain auctions currently underway.
The parachain auctions are for lesser known projects to have a chance
to be a spoke on the Polkadot wheel.
Listen.
These are gems in the making.
Pay close attention to who's winning these spots and write them down.
We all saw what happened with Moonriver within a couple of weeks.
It could easily happen again.
The first auction started bidding on November 11.
In order to become a parachain on DOT or KSM,
the project has to win a slot auction through crowdloans of bidding more DOT than their competitors.
If the project wins a slot auction,
they earn a spot on the Relay Chain and lock up the DOT for the duration of their lease.
The maximum amount of time a project can lease on Kusama is 48 weeks
and two years on Polkadot.
Projects do have an option to renew the lease when the time expires.
There are expected to be 100 parachain slots.
On November 18,
DeFi protocol known as Acala won the first Polkadot parachain auction
with over $1.3 billion in DOT committed.
Moonbeam, sister chain of Moonriver, won the second parachain auction
with over 35 million DOT contributed from 200,000+ contributors worldwide.
Moonbeam prides itself for creating the most powerful Ethereum-compatible smart contract on Polkadot.
This project will launch Q1 of 2022.
On December 2,
Polkadot put out a tweet congratulating the Astar Network
on winning the third parachain auction
with over 27,000 contributions.
Formerly known as Plasma Network,
Astar is a multi-chain build-to-earn Polkadot dApp hub.
More and more news will continue to circulate around DOT's parachains
as there will be a new winner every week for the next 90+ weeks.
Polkadot announced that the first five winners of the auctions are set to launch on December 17.
Due to popular demand,
countless projects are crowdloaning to try to earn a spot in the prestigious DOT family.
But one hopeful I want to mention is Efinity.
According to a December 1 article from cryptoninjas.net,
"Enjin, a decentralized platform for NFTs, today announced over 70+ ecosystem partners
have committed to building the decentralized metaverse on Efinity."
I'm proud to say that one of those aforementioned 70+ ecosystem partners
is our very own Pluto Alliance.
We believe in Efinity,
and, yes, Pluto is a planet.
Take a moment to smash that like and subscribe button.
It puts you in the BitSquad,
the most pro Pluto crypto channel in all of the Interwebs.
The Polkadot family continues to get larger as every week passes.
This is a very large ecosystem, and if you have the time,
make sure to comb over each and every coin that's available to trade within the DOT family
because when DOT starts to gain some momentum,
the lower cap coins below it will have much more volatile price action.
I'll do more dedicated reviews of the deeper Polkadot ecosystem,
but for now,
that's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.