Portico in Polkadot: A Thesis
Polkadot is one of the most advanced blockchain developments in the making. In itself is quite intricate, yet designed from the very beginning to be future proof. These design decision taken from the very beginning have made Polkadot a resilient system, however they also made it quite challenging for builders to consume it’s resources.
With Agile Coretime coming to Polkadot, a clear transitioning to a new model is happening, where accessing Polkadot’s resources will become more open for everyone. Yet this covers only one third of the problem that builders have: they still need to build their systems, safely deploy them, and then access the underlying resources to connect to Polkadot.
| Build | Deploy | Access |
|---|---|---|
| OpenZeppelin Runtimes | Tanssi(*) | Agile Coretime |
| Parachain Templates | Lastic | |
| POP by R0Gue | RegionX |
Build
Portico’s role: Integration
Currently, the primary way to consume Polkadot resources is by building a Parachain. However, this is expected to change, although it may take a long time for the dynamic consumption of Polkadot resources to become a reality.
Portico has the opportunity to leverage the ongoing development of Parachain Templates within the Polkadot Ecosystem. These templates, created by various parties, offer pre-designed and opinionated starting points for builders. This allows developers to begin their projects with a solid foundation, rather than starting from scratch.
Deploy
Portico’s role: Develop
Web2 became much more accessible for tinkerers and entrepreneurs when they were able to iterate and deploy quickly into the open world. This enabled them to test small and fail small, allowing them to continue searching for the right product-market fit. However, starting from scratch is not an easy task, and services like Heroku, Netlify, and others emerged to democratize this access.
Similarly, the majority of Web3 Builders are not accustomed to maintaining networks for their projects. Currently, they develop their smart contracts locally on a mock setup and rely on others to maintain the network for deployment. If Polkadot aims to host these projects, it should offer an easier deployment process.
Access Polkadot Resources
Portico’s role: Integration
The new model that Polkadot will implement aims to improve accessibility to Polkadot’s Coretime. It introduces an open market for coretime accessibility, providing options for both bulk selling and instantaneous selling. Buyers who purchase and consume in bulk can benefit from cost predictability in the long term. Portico’s role is to integrate these markets into it’s platform.
(*) Tanssi
Portico’s role: Integration
Tanssi for us is one of the most innovative and exciting projects that emerged on the Polkadot Ecosystem. Their aim is to allow for easy deployment with a set of decentralized collators. This is an offering that Portico will integrate into it’s platform, however it aims as well to provide a service by which teams can decide to deploy their own set of collators or go into any other direction.
Portico
Portico is on a mission to simplify the deployment on Polkadot. Anyone can deploy fast and effortlessly.
Portico’s offering will be divided into a four step process.
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Runtime Builder
Portico leverages existing templates efforts in the ecosystem, and integrates them into an easy UI for people to customize their initial parachain.
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Network Topology
Whether it’s it’s own network or if it’s utilizing existing resources on Polkadot -like Tanssi- Portico offers users the ability to choose how they want to deploy their chains, without all the hassling of running the nodes themselves.
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Coretime Access
By integrating with other solutions in the ecosystem, Portico’s third step is to allow users to easily pick the way they want to consume Coretime. This is paired with regular notifications on Coretime usage.
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Product Iteration
Leveraging Polkadot SDK’s unique ability to upgrade a network without the need of a fork, Portico integrates existing tooling to dry-run runtime upgrades and thus allow users to be able to iterate on their product offer fast and thus find product market fit.
Supporting the Polkadot Ecosystem
Portico’s team is based out of high experienced individuals on both the Polkadot SDK and Polkadot as a network. For that, the team will be also contributing on the efforts to run a community based testnet. We are committed to designing, upgrading and maintaining the runtime of this testnet, together with the runtime of the system chains, as well as running a sub-set of the nodes to ensure the smooth operation of the network. Portico’s team will also play an integral role when it comes to coordinating the community around this testnet.
A deeper discussion can be found The new Polkadot community testnet and A new test network for Polkadot.
A self-sustainable business
We are pursuing the aggressive objective of becoming self-sustainable within 1 year. This is based on a tiered service offering that allows users to customize their deployment together with the growth of their business. This will highly depend on Polkadot growing as a network, but we at Portico deeply believe that if we remove the barriers of entry for this ecosystem, we will be deeply contributing to the growth of the network.
What’s next
Portico will be applying for the Decentralized Futures program of the W3F. The team is also working on an MVP that will be posted on this thread for anyone to run and provide feedback on.
Portico understands builders, as the team has been building and contributing to Polkadot for the past 3 years. Polkadot has an incredible chance in 2024 to exponentially grow the number of projects, and Portico is here to help make that a reality. Let’s build together.