Polkadot's Elastic Scalability: Providing Higher Throughput for Parachains

Polkadot is committed to creating a platform focused on excellent scalability and security, aimed at providing the best operating environment for decentralized applications. By layering the platform architecture, Polkadot achieves effective scalability. The relay chain serves as the core, providing shared security for all parachains, supporting up to 300 parachains. Each parachain can submit a block for each block of the relay chain.

This layered architecture allows parachain projects to integrate resources and gain strong security support, significantly reducing the risk of attacks. In contrast, if each parachain operates security measures on independent blockchains, security resources will be dispersed, making attacks easier and cheaper.

Elastic scalability is an exciting innovation in the Polkadot ecosystem, opening up new possibilities for a wider range of application scenarios. At its core, it allows parachains to generate and validate multiple blocks for each relay chain block. Although these parachain blocks are constructed sequentially, the relay chain can process them in parallel.

Polkadot introduces the concept of "core", similar to the previous "slot" concept. A core represents the resources and time used to validate parachain blocks on the relay chain. For example, if the relay chain can validate 50 parachain blocks simultaneously, it is said to have 50 cores, similar to how a 50-core processor can execute 50 threads at the same time. This allows high-throughput parachains to execute transactions faster.

The implementation of Agile Coretime has changed the traditional slot allocation model. "Coretime" refers to the use of a core right on the relay chain. The new mechanism allows the acquisition of one or more core usage rights of varying durations (from one month to one block) through on-chain purchases or secondary markets.

Elastic scaling combined with multi-core and Agile Coretime allows parachains to rent additional cores in a short time, accelerating block validation speed to process more transactions. This benefits various blockchain entities, such as service providers who can expand their customer base, increase revenue, and enhance their influence.

Elastic scaling is particularly valuable for applications with unpredictable core time requirements. They can purchase core time based on actual demand, avoiding the trade-off between high cost and low performance. Emerging applications can gradually increase core time as users grow, without having to make large purchases upfront or losing users due to insufficient resources.

Elastic scaling also improves cost-effectiveness. It allows applications to pay for core time only when needed, reducing costs for all participants, and enables projects to resell excess core time through a potential secondary market.

Compared to other scaling models, such as Ethereum's Layer-2 solutions, Polkadot's flexible scaling has advantages in security and computational efficiency. Layer-2 solutions either sacrifice some security (like "optimistic" rollups) or require a large number of node computations (like "zero-knowledge" models).

In the future, Polkadot also plans to launch a more comprehensive CoreJAM model that integrates Agile Coretime and elastic scaling. In addition, the CorePlay concept proposes the possibility of faster scheduling between different smart contracts, further enhancing interoperability.

Polkadot is continuously innovating, committed to achieving the greatest scalability and security within the interconnected network in the future, in preparation for a new wave of adoption for Web3.