Parachains

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Parachains are custom, project-specific blockchains that are integrated within the Polkadot (DOT) and Kusama (KSM) networks.


The winners of the first auction include parachain teams focusing on a variety of topics from decentralised finance to investments and loans, as well as smart contracting.

The first five winners of the auction were Acala, Moonbeam, Parallel Finance, Astar, and Clover. They will be able to lease a slot on Polkadot's main blockchain, Relay Chain, for up to 96 weeks at a time. As the ecosystem grows, especially with the nascent emergence of metaverses, dozens of protocols will become increasingly visible.

How many Parachains DOT and Kusama support:

In its current state, both the Polkadot and Kusama relay chains can support up to 100 parachains, a number that is flexible and subject to change by governance vote over time. Parachain slot auctions are used as a means to decide which parachain will be connected to the relay chain.

How Parachains Work

Polkadot and Kusama are networks that allow both information and tokens to be transferred on them. Unlike Ethereum, where decentralized applications are created within the bounds set by its blockchain, Polkadot and Kusama allow developers to create their own independent blockchains.

This means that each parachain can have its own parameters such as block times, transaction fees, governance mechanism and mining rewards.

Parachains benefit from the Polkadot and Kusama network’s security, maintained by the Relay Chain, rather than having to rely on their own set of validator nodes. Instead, parachains are maintained by collator nodes that store a full history for each parachain and aggregate parachain transaction data into blocks to be added to the Relay Chain.

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