Statemint, which is crucial to Polkadot, will be launched as scheduled. What impact will this have on the ecology?

Produced by the Polkadot Ecological Research Institute, it must be a boutique

(The article is very long, it is recommended to bookmark it before reading)

background

Produced by the Polkadot Ecological Research Institute, it must be a boutique

(The article is very long, it is recommended to bookmark it before reading)

background

On December 17, Polkadot passed and implemented the No. 46 referendum, officially upgrading Shell to the asset chain Statemint. Strictly speaking, this is the first parachain on Polkadot. At the same time, it is also a parachain distributed through governance. A public interest parachain that gets free slots, not a parachain obtained through auctions, therefore makes a lot of sense in comparison.

As early as a few months ago, Kusama also launched a public interest parachain named "Statemine". Compared with Statemint on the Polkadot network, except for the slightly different ending letters, the two are essentially asset parachains of different networks. Therefore, understanding the role it plays in a network gives an overall picture. Of course, compared with the more familiar parachains obtained through auctions, the existence of Statemint is not so well known to the public, or even a little strange.

After all, compared to the auction process, upgrading from Shell to Statemint does not seem to be a big news, and it has not even been seen in many media, but as the so-called highest state of kung fu lies in winning without tricks, perhaps Statemint is more in line with this description.

Therefore, in this article, we try to dismantle the past and present of Statemint, as well as the hidden value and future development behind it, in a more comprehensive and concrete way.

What exactly is Statemint?

Statemint is a universal asset chain jointly developed by the Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies, which allows anyone in the Polkadot ecosystem to deploy various types of digital assets, including homogeneous assets, such as various Tokens, central bank digital currency (CBDC), also including non-fungible assets (NFT).

Statemint is simple, not as complicated as the relay chain or smart contract chain, it is just a chain for creating and managing assets. It is mainly composed of two modules, one is the Assets module that deals with homogeneous assets, and the other is the Unique module that manages non-homogeneous assets NFT.

The rest are run-of-the-mill stuff like accounts and balances. Accounts can store assets, and there are also some practical functions that you often see in Substrate chains, such as cross-chain messages, proxy, and multi-signature.

Statemint was proposed as one of the first public interest parachains of the Polkadot network and has now been implemented. Thanks to the advanced design, when deploying assets on Statemint, the cost will be much lower than other solutions, and even allows no holding Users of DOT use these assets.

Therefore, when users use Statemint to issue, manage and transfer digital assets, they will spend less friction costs and lower fees. Therefore, Statemint can be seen as an excellent use case for becoming the first general-purpose parachain. It should be noted that the governance of Statemint is completely consistent with the relay chain it is connected to, a bit like a branch company has to listen to the arrangement of the parent company. Therefore, it will accept the governance of the relay chain, and its governance rights belong to all DOT holders. Any future upgrade needs to be voted by DOT holders.

The significance of Statemint to Polkadot

First of all, the emergence of Statemint means that the Polkadot ecosystem can have a stable place to issue assets.

If there is no Statemint, the Polkadot ecological project must first issue assets on other public chains, such as issuing ERC20 assets on Ethereum, and then map the ERC20 Token situation to its own chain after the mainnet goes online , but the whole process will be tedious and complicated.

And the transfer cost of ERC20 on Ethereum is still very high; either it needs to rely on the function of a certain parachain, but if the subsequent operation of this parachain does not work, it does not even develop, and eventually dies, it will affect the transactions in this parachain. Assets issued on the parallel chain. Therefore, as a public interest parachain, Statemint can be regarded as a state-owned enterprise in charge of asset issuance, custody and transfer that will never die, and can solve the problem of Polkadot's ecological asset issuance once and for all.

Secondly, Statemint provides a stable and high-quality issuance platform for mature assets, which will allow existing mature assets to enter the Polkadot ecosystem. For example, asset projects such as USDT and USDC with a volume of tens of billions of dollars are opened through Statemint Their casting journey in Polkadot ecology. Not to mention the rapidly developing NFT market, as well as the CBDC with great potential in the future.

Then, Statemint can reduce the burden on the Polkadot relay chain, and the existing functions of the relay chain, such as transaction functions, and treasury modules, etc., are carried by Statemint.

Entrusting these functions to a separate parachain can greatly improve the efficiency of validators, because if there are a total of 1,000 validators, if the same function is implemented on the relay chain, all 1,000 validators must go to Execute it, but if it is placed on a single parachain, only 20 validators are required to execute it, and the improved efficiency can be seen. The resulting impact is that, one is to further reduce all the funding rates involved by 1/10, for example, the existing transaction fees can be greatly reduced, which is about 1/10 of the relay chain fee, which may be further reduced in the future Reduced to 1/50.

The second is to improve the efficiency of the use of the relay chain validator, without having to do cumbersome and inefficient asset calculations, but to free up energy to carry the operation of the parachain, so that the relay chain can support more parachains.

In addition, after the treasury module is migrated to Statemint, it will allow the treasury to hold other assets, including Token or NFT. In the future, when you apply for the treasury bill, you can apply for other assets, such as stable coins, so you don’t have to worry about treasury funds arriving. At the time of accounting, unnecessary losses may be caused by fluctuations in DOT prices.

Finally, Statemint will also be an important value capture scenario for DOT. As a public interest parachain, Statemint is characterized by not having its own additional Token, but will use DOT for many of the scenarios, for example, when transferring money on Statemint, you will also need to spend DOT as a transaction fee (or other assets) .

It is worth mentioning that although there are still transaction fees, Gavin attaches great importance to the issue of gas fees. Therefore, when designing Polkadot, the calculation method of gas fees is designed to be very easy to calculate, which greatly reduces transaction costs, and Polkadot will not The high gas fee of Ethereum appears.

And in addition to the need for DOT when transferring money, DOT is also required to be deposited as a deposit when using the proxy or multi-signature function (only a small amount of DOT is required), and the account also has a minimum DOT deposit requirement to prevent dust attacks, (accounts with insufficient deposits will be destroyed).

These designs will make people have some basic needs for DOT, but it will not take place like the gas fee on Ethereum affecting normal use.

With the development of the Polkadot ecology, a lot of assets (Token, NFT, CBDC) will be minted on Statemint, and a huge asset pool will be formed, and more and more assets will be circulated in the asset pool , the scenarios of cross-chain interaction with other parallel chains will become more and more abundant, and these will be just-needed scenarios of DOT.

Therefore, the prosperity of the Polkadot ecology will promote the richness of assets and the velocity of asset circulation in Statemint, which will make DOT capture more value, which will further attract more developers, funds and users to participate in the Polkadot ecology , to accelerate the development of Polkadot ecology.

In the end, Statemint will form a positive spiral upward cycle with the development of Polkadot ecology, and the future can be expected!

Status of Statemint

It has been nearly a week since the official launch of Statemint. What is the current development of Statemint and the future strategic plan? First of all, Statemint has created the "Creation" state. The so-called "Creation" state means that after the Polkadot network initially sent two messages to Shell, the parachain was upgraded to Statemint.

One of the messages writes some value to storage and sets the network key for the first Aura collators, declaring Statemint's "secure" version of XCM, forming the rudimentary smart contract.

The other news authorized the upgrade of Statemint Runtime and officially launched the function of creating and managing tokens. At the same time, Polkadot has handed over the governance rights of Statemint to all DOT holders. Any future upgrade will require the vote of DOT holders, making efforts in the direction of relatively complete decentralization.

The Disputes protocol enhances the security of assets on Statemint, making DOT on Statemint as safe as DOT on the relay chain. At the same time, after the Runtime audit, Statemint's asset creation and XCMP channel functions will be gradually opened. And we mentioned above that users can use the assets on Statemint without holding DOT for trading other assets, and these functions will also become a reality in the future.

postscript

The treasury will hold other assets through the custody of Statemint, and the application will also realize the parallelization logic of cross-chain assets through Statemint. In addition, Statemint may also implement the NFT transfer function of the NFT market on the smart contract parachain. And all this is just the beginning of having assets on Statemint and interacting with other parachains.

The current Disputes protocol already exists, and Polkadot will be launched in the near future, and we expect more functions of Statemint in the near future.

postscript

As for where the big ship will eventually sail and when it will arrive, there is a high probability that only the "rose of time" will be left.

*The information provided by the Polkadot Ecological Research Institute does not represent any investment hints. The published articles only represent personal opinions and are for reference only. Since there are no policies and regulations related to digital assets in China, users in mainland China are requested to pay close attention to the development of Crypto.

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