Days after Polkadot blockchain’s governance council members approved the schedule for the parachain slot auctions, Polkadot (DOT) founder, Gavin Wood in a tweet, unveiled a $776 million development fund.
In the tweet, Gavin Wood explained that Polkadot’s treasury has allocated more than 18.9 million DOT (worth roughly $776 million at the time of writing) to a development fund that will be disbursed through community governance.
Wood stated, “The @Polkadot treasury currently has 18,936,300 DOT (DOT, not USD – do the math) in it ready to spend on *your* ideas for building, improving, educating and indeed, anything else that the Polkadot governance believes valuable.”
Polkadot’s parachain slot auctions
According to Polkadot’s Wiki, the treasury funds can be spent if approved by the council, which votes on proposals put forward to them. The Polkadot council currently consists of 13 members, however, the council plans to expand to 24 seats at some stage in the future.
As previously mentioned, this news comes days before Polkadot’s highly anticipated parachain slot auctions which are scheduled to begin in early November. This indicates that the funds could be intended to kickstart development targeting, Polkadot’s forthcoming parachain ecosystem.
Parachains are uniquely distinctive layer-1 blockchain platforms that operate laterally alongside the main Polkadot network, in addition to being tethered to the Polkadot Relay Chain. Parachains are sharded sidechains that can host decentralized applications and protocols, offer specialized computation, and communicate with Polkadot’s proof-of-stake “Relay Chain” to finalize transactions.
Polkadot’s existing relay chain exclusively processes transfers, governance, staking services for the Polkadot network, with the forthcoming parachains being tasked with providing advanced features like smart contract functionality and cross-chain compatibility. As such, the new development fund may be intended to encourage developers to begin building on Polkadot in preparation of parachains going live.
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Polkadot is not the only blockchain pumping money into its ecosystem for development. Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume announced that it had committed $1 billion to further boost its blockchain ecosystem, known as the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
Polkadot’s native token, DOT currently trades $41.18, down 1% for the day, as of the time of this writing.
