Polkadot introduces JAM upgrade and 10 million DOT prize to enhance network capabilities News ▸ Polkadot ▸ Technology
Polkadot introduces JAM upgrade and 10 million DOT prize to enhance network capabilities
Gavin Wood intoduced the Gray Paper of the planned upgrade at the Token2049 crypto conference in Dubai.
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Updated: Apr. 18, 2024 at 4:56 pm UTC
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Gavin Wood, Polkadot’s founder, introduced the Gray Paper outlining the upcoming Join-Accumulate Machine (JAM) upgrade for the network. This announcement was made during Wood’s presentation on Polkadot’s future at the Token2049 crypto conference in Dubai.
Web3 Foundation, the entity behind Polkadot, further announced a 10 Million DOT prize pool to foster diversity within the development of the JAM protocol.
According to the firm:
“The JAM Implementer’s Prize is designed to catalyze this by funding and supporting projects that contribute to the development of JAM implementations from the outset.”
What is JAM?
JAM is a decentralized hybrid system designed to offer secure and scalable smart contract functionalities. It combines certain features from Ethereum within Polkadot’s architectural framework.
Polkadot said:
“JAM is a protocol combining elements of both Polkadot and Ethereum. It is a prospective path to replace the Relay Chain with a more modular, minimalistic design.”
Web3 Foundation added that JAM would allow Polkadot to run generic “services,” smart contract logic to process the execution result on cores. A parachains service will run existing Substrate-based parachains, meaning developers can still use Substrate to develop and deploy their blockchains.
In essence, JAM provides a global singleton permissionless object environment—akin to Ethereum’s smart-contract environment—paired with secure sideband computation parallelized over a scalable node network.
Goku, a supporter of the blockchain network, explained that the upgrade would allow Polkadot
to become “a true multi-core world computer capable of handling any type of service or app without scalability, security, or efficiency issues.” He added:
“[Polkadot] has already become a multi-core processor, but this was limited to parachains. The idea is to generalize this even further, to be utterly unopinionated about what and how things are deployed, turning all parachains, aka rollups, into an application layer service, with Polkadot transforming into something akin to cloud service infrastructure.”
Meanwhile, the proposed upgrade would continue to utilize the network’s DOT token. Following the news, the digital asset bucked its current downward trend to rise by around 3% to as high as $7. However, it has retraced to $6.62 as of press time.
It should be noted that the JAM upgrade is still subject to Polkadot’s community approval via the network’s on-chain, decentralized governance.
[Editor’s Note: When interacting with any competition or airdrop links, remember to triple-check the domain authenticity to ensure you are connecting to a valid source.]
Disclaimer: CryptoSlate has received a grant from the Polkadot Foundation to produce content about the Polkadot ecosystem. While the Foundation supports our coverage, we maintain full editorial independence and control over the content we publish.
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Gavin Wood is the former Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of the Ethereum Project.