The Week in Polkadot: Gavin Wood Unveils ‘Major Upgrade’ JAM at Token2049

Welcome to Decrypt’s Week in Polkadot, our regular round-up of the latest developments in the Polkadot ecosystem.

At the Token2049 conference in Dubai this week, Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood introduced a graypaper outlining the Join-Accumulate Machine (JAM), billed as “a proposal for the future of Polkadot.”

In a “major revision,” the JAM protocol would replace Polkadot’s Relay Chain with a “more modular, minimalistic design,” building a permissionless object environment akin to Ethereum’s smart contract environment.

“JAM will allow Polkadot to run generic “services”, smart contract logic which can process the result of execution on cores,” Polkadot founding organization the Web3 Foundation explained in a statement.

JAM will incorporate a parachains service that can run existing parachains built on the Substrate blockchain framework, meaning that developers can still use Substrate to develop and deploy their own blockchains. Other technical improvements include the replacement of WebAssembly with the Polkadot Virtual Machine.

JAM tomorrow

As Polkadot is a decentralized network, the transition to JAM isn’t a fait accompli, of course; should the transition to JAM be approved by the network through a governance proposal, the graypaper noted, “this protocol might also become known as Polkadot or some derivation thereof.”

In a tweet, Polkadot stated that, “The only way to interact with JAM will be with DOT,” and that no new token would be issued.

Alongside the launch of the graypaper, the Web3 Foundation announced the JAM Implementer’s Prize, a 10 million DOT prize pool “aimed at fostering diversity in the development of the JAM protocol.” The prize aims to “encourage the creation of multiple client implementations,” in a bid to enhance the network’s resilience, the Web3 Foundation added.

Polimec reveals first wave of projects raising funds

Decentralized community-driven funding protocol Polimec has taken the wraps off the first wave of projects set to raise funds on the platform.

Among the first projects raising funds on Polimec are Polkadot development platform Apillon, which enables developers to create NFTs and other Web3 projects using API connections and a drag-and-drop UI.

Another project, Mandala Chain, aims to provide an ecosystem for dapps using an EVM compatible, open, permissionless public blockchain built using Substrate. And gotEM is an investigations DAO that enables users to crowdfund and crowdsource resources for investigations and private security tasks using a trustless, decentralized infrastructure.

The Polkadot-based Polimec enables projects to raise funds using on-chain credentials, while maintaining regulatory compliance.