• The Polkadot community said that it has overcome all technical barriers for the Parachain launch.
• The Parachain auctions will start next month onwards and will happen in two separate phases.

The talk of the crypto town is currently Polkadot as the community is finally ready for the launch of the much-awaited parachains. On Wednesday, October 13, the Polkadot community announced that they are now officially ready for launch.

Besides, Polkadot founders Gavin Wood and Robert Habermeier also said that the Polkadot blockchain is now technically capable of supporting its first parachains. The Polkadot parachains were first proposed in the Polkadot whitepaper released five years back.

Parachains are nothing but diverse and specialized blockchains connecting to the Polkadot Relay Chain. Thus, they cater to the ‘multichain’ aspect of Polkadot’s network architecture. They constitue the final piece of the puzzle in Polkadot’s core technology.

The announcement from the Polkadot co-founder came while speaking at the Sub0 conference. Explaining their preparations for the parachain launch, the founders said:

Parachains, auctions, and crowdloans code is now ready for an initial production release on Polkadot. The last technical steps necessary to complete before launching parachains on Polkadot were the completion of Polkadot’s full code audit, which is now done, and the finalization of parachain disputes, which can now move forward.

The Polkadot Parachain auctions

The Polkadot parachain auctions will begin next month starting November 11, 2021. Polkadot determines the auction bidder based on who’s the highest bidder at a randomly selected point. In total, there will be 11 parachain auctions happening in two batches.

The first batch will start on November 11 with one parachain auction happening every week. The second batch will start on December 23 with one auction happening every two weeks.

Polkadot has already tested success by successfully running parachains on its ‘canary network’ Kusama. So far, 11 parachains auctions have successfully happened on Kusama since June 2021. In the last four months, there haven’t been any significant issues with running these parachains.

The parachain teams have also conducted several ‘forkless’ upgrades on the network while conducting several million transactions. Earlier this week, Gavin Wood praised the Polkadot governance community for their work. He tweeted:

Whereas other chains take months or even years to deploy an upgrade, @Polkadot and @KusamaNetwork created, voted and deployed new logic on to the chain within 8 hours. All going through a secure, stakeholder-governed decentralized process.

The Polkadot (DOT) price skyrockets

Following the news of the parachain launch, the DOT price rallied more than 20 percent. As of press time, Polkadot (DOT) is trading 20.83 percent up at a price of $41.27 with a market cap of $40.76 billion.

Polkadot (DOT) is currently the eighth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap. The cryptocurrency has delivered a strong performance so far in 2021 with 5x returns or 400% gains. DOT has also been part of hedge fund portfolios recently. The parachain launch can possibly add more fuel to the DOT price rally.