Polkadot’s Expansion: Aiming for 1,000 Parachains

Sophia Gold, the Parity Engineering Lead, emphasized the potential of the “asynchronous backing” update. This particular enhancement will reduce the parachain block time from 12 seconds down to just 6, as well as expand the block space for every block by a factor of 5-10. She expressed,

“We’ve designed a concrete path to support 1,000 parachains and exceed 1 million transactions every second. The future of Polkadot scaling is crystal clear to us, given the mechanisms we’ve put in place.”

For those unfamiliar, Polkadot stands out as an integration-centric network. It bridges various specialized blockchains, known as parachains, that gain their security robustness from a primary blockchain named the Relay Chain.

In the upcoming weeks, the eager eyes of developers will be set on Polkadot’s Rococo testnet, which is expected to witness the deployment of the asynchronous backing. This development intel came from Parity Technologies, a principal contributor to Polkadot, during the sub0 developer conference held in Lisbon. However, the timeline for this update’s introduction to the mainnet is still in the air.

This is arguably the most monumental shift in parachain consensus since the debut of parachains nearly two years back

Taking it a step further, Gold pointed out another advantage of the asynchronous backing update. By the culmination of 2024, this enhancement could potentially amplify the count of Polkadot validators to approximately 1,000, marking a threefold increase. Reflecting on its importance, she remarked, “This is arguably the most monumental shift in parachain consensus since the debut of parachains nearly two years back.”