Polkadot

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Polkadot consists of a Relay Chain and several Parachains, as well as Bridges for heterogeneous chains.

Relay Chain is responsible for the shared security consensus of the entire network and the cross-chain transaction forwarding of parallel chains. The relay chain can be understood as a gateway with security consensus. On the relay chain, Polkadot uses a modern asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) algorithm to reach a mutual consensus on valid blocks. The algorithm is inspired by simple Tendermint and HoneyBadgerBFT. The relay chain itself does not contain anything, and is only responsible for the routing of the top-level cross-chain messages, and applications are developed and deployed on the parachain.

Parachain is a parallel blockchain application attached to the security provided by the relay chain. Parachain provides shared security consensus and cross-chain message forwarding between parachains. Parachains can use different types of underlying blockchain technologies, allowing each participant to define their own effective methods to solve problems in specific areas. For example, the parachain can be a cross-chain platform with different currencies, or it can be a platform for matching transactions.

Bridges: Compared to some heterogeneous chains, it may be necessary. For example, when Ethereum needs to interact with Polkadot, the data of Ethereum will be converted to the requirements for interaction in Polkadot through the specially developed Bridge for Ethereum. Pattern.