Polkadot, a popular protocol aimed at connecting different blockchains, allowing value and data to be sent across incompatible networks, has reached an important milestone and introduced an update that took the team nearly 5 years to be developed and completed. The first set of parachains, layer 1 scalability solutions for Polkadot blockchain, was launched over the weekend. There are currently five parachains – Acala, Moonbeam, Parallel Finance, Astar and Clover – that are live and are focused on a variety of topics from decentralized finance (DeFi), to investments and loans. A major online Polkadot Parachain Party featured founders Gavin Wood and Robert Habermeier, and the first parachain auction winners.

Ultimately, it is claimed that Polkadot would offer 100 parachain slots which will be allocated in batches over the coming months. 

On the other side of the interoperability forefront Polygon, formerly known as Matic, one of the most popular layer 2 solutions for DeFi trading and Ethereum network scaling, has had a blast of a time over the last couple months. The Uniswap community approved the deployment of Uniswap v3 contracts over the Polygon PoS Chain. Over 72.6 million Uniswap users participated in the on-chain community vote – consensus was 99,3%.

The news comes just hours after the announcement of Polygon and Seven Seven Six, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital firm, starting a $200 million initiative for Web 3.0 and social media projects. The initiative’s focus is on gaming applications and social media platforms built on Polygon’s infrastructure.

Earlier this month, Polygon confirmed a strategic partnership with Wanchain, a solution that enables cross-chain decentralised transactions. This duet is probably a turning point as it marks the first instance of using decentralised liquidity pools to power cross-chain bridges. 

Interoperability and the ability for users to build applications and transfer data and assets across different blockchains remains the main problem for the industry in general, and for DeFi in particular. Various L1 and  L2 solutions are designed to massively scale networks and boost market development, making user experience convenient and various systems to be fully compatible with each other.

Photo by xresch