Reconsideration on Polkadot Parachain Slot Auction

SubDAO Protocol
4 min readDec 3, 2021
Reconsideration on Polkadot Parachain Slot Auction

Through discussion with the development team and prudent consideration, SubDAO Labs officially decided to suspend Polkadot Parachain Slot Auction, and prioritize cooperation with other parachains.

SubDAO will deploy its contracts on Moonriver as the first step to cooperate with other parachains.

Why?

Parachain may not be the “best option” for us

Parachain is a tremendous innovation of Polkadot. Once a project builds a parachain, it can better share the whole ecosystem’s resources, and the parachain will own more autonomy to build its ecosystem as an independent chain.

However, there are application samples beyond such a paradigm in the Polkadot ecosystem.

Take RMRK as an example. RMRK developed a general Module to support RMRK NFT standard protocol. Any projects built on Substrate can integrate this Module to support RMRK standard protocol whether it is parachain or it supports contract. Such a technical solution allows NFT business to run on the Polkadot ecosystem with the highest speed and simplest way, without waiting for Polkadot official development, without a smart contract, without bidding for a parachain slot. This is a very smart technical solution.

The application has multiple features:

· Decentralized backend logic of the application itself

· Not just user-application interaction, but user-chain interaction

· Application itself is not a parachain, but a pluggable Module, one that can (not “must”) be deployed on parachain

· Upgradability: The application’s upgrades are flexible

Compared with smart contracts and parachain, such technology structures can easily realize function upgrades. It keeps the features of decentralization and smart contract while having high agility in technology.

Parachain’s advantage fails to be fully tapped because of frequent updates of XCM

XCM is a general cross-chain message format. Within Gavin’s planning, XCM will not only become the general language among parachains of Polkadot, but a general cross-chain language within a bigger range.

But due to the issue of frequent updates of XCM, multiple parachains have lower progress in confirming respective versions and debugging. This process may take a relatively long time. Among over ten Kusama’s operating parachains, only a few are interconnected. More parachains are isolated. That’s why the advantage of parachain’s modularity hasn’t been fully tapped.

At this stage, even though we secure a Polkadot parachain slot, the auctioned lease will be wasted on debugging and connectivity. At the same time, the process of debugging and connectivity distract developers’ attention from their own core business.

But SubDAO has a business model different from that of Moonbeam and Acala. Just take asset management as an example, SubDAO has to serve other parachains with cross-chain services by using the XCM function to realize the business value instead operates as an independent closed chain.

Cost issue

In terms of this issue, we also received feedback from many investors and our community. We have mentioned that XCM’s frequent updates will result in much waste of the auctioned lease in the previous article. The cost of the auction itself is an important factor that we consider. Parachain auction will result in the costs of tokens, which in the next two years will enable massive token circulation, which will cause relatively big pressure for the project. Besides, costs of parachain development and maintenance will restrict our investment in our own core business.

Based on all the above-mentioned factors, we decide to terminate the Polkadot Parachain Slot Auction, then directly start cooperation with parachains, explore new development paths and focus on DAO’s core business development.

However, it doesn’t mean SubDAO wouldn’t build its parachain in the future.

In the future, when SubDAO provides more services and needs a better chain, we will reconsider building a parachain designated for SubDAO when relevant technologies have been fully validated and become mature, also the costs have been reduced.

About economic model’s adjustment and other plans

In light of the parachain strategy change, we will adjust SubDAO token economic model accordingly. The specifics are as follows:

SubDAO will burn two thirds of the total pre-deposited tokens for parachain auction, that is 20% of all in circulation. The remaining one third will be kept as “Future Parachain Plan Costs and Eco Developer Incentive”. After this adjustment, the total supply of the GOV token will change from one billion tokens to 800 million, a decrease of 20%.

* We posted an announcement that we will conduct Listing-relevant marketing campaigns around Dec 4th before. However, due to changes in the parachain slot auction strategy and the economic model, the listing plan will be delayed. New specific date will be posted at an appropriate time.

It is important to note that the community can still claim the GOV token on Dec.4th as the plan, while the transfer function will be released after SubDAO contract deployment on Moonriver.

Thanks for all support and understanding from the community, and SubDAO really appreciates the strong supports from Huobi Global, OKEx, Gate, MEXC, etc.

About SubDAO

SubDAO is a cross-chain DAO protocol based on Polkadot. It allows any decentralized organization to swiftly create and manage DAOs. We are committed to serving as a Web3.0 entry by providing blockchain-based digital agreement signing, DAO social networking, asset management, and other tools and services.

SubDAO has completed multi-million dollars financing from dozens of institutions including Huobi Ventures, OKEx Blockdream Fund, CMS, Hypersphere as well as investment by Messari founder Ryan Selkis. The founding team of SubDAO is composed of the former Technical Team leader of the IBM Group and many early well-known developers from Polkadot.

Follow SubDAO

Website: https://subdao.network

Github: https://github.com/SubDAO-Network/

Medium: https://medium.com/@subdao

Twitter: https://twitter.com/subdao_network

Telegram: https://t.me/subdao

Discord: https://discord.gg/Z8jtYqWbbN

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SubDAO Protocol

SubDAO is a DAO infrastructure that helps manage digital assets through middleware, multi-sig, and other decentralized features.