Elastic Scaling is Live on Polkadot
Elastic Scaling is now complete and available for parachain teams on Polkadot.
Elastic Scaling introduces vertical scalability for rollups, allowing parachain teams to handle growing demand with greater efficiency. For the first time, they can deliver a user experience that is much closer to Web2, characterized by speed, responsiveness, and smoothness, with shorter in-block confirmation delays.
This milestone marks the completion of the entire launch checklist, encompassing testnet deployments, runtime upgrades, and referenda across Kusama and Polkadot.
What is Elastic Scaling?
Elastic Scaling allows parachains to dynamically utilize multiple cores simultaneously, unlocking the potential for significant throughput increases. Rollups can now scale vertically to meet demand instead of being limited to a single core. Polkadot’s upgraded architecture is designed for workloads that rely on:
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Low-latency execution and high throughput
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Consistent performance under heavy demand
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Real-time user interaction and responsiveness
A Simple Analogy: Coffee and Finality
Think about buying a coffee in a café.
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You tap your wallet, and the payment is initiated.
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The merchant doesn’t wait for the funds to settle in their account before serving you the coffee.
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They trust that the payment will be finalized, and life will move forward smoothly.
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The customer gets their coffee without delay.
With Elastic Scaling, parachians can significantly reduce block time, improving the speed at which transactions are confirmed with each block. In the cafe analogy, it’s like serving customers faster without altering the order verification process, ensuring a smoother, more responsive experience while the system still guarantees eventual certainty.
Completing the Polkadot Upgrade
Elastic Scaling is the final piece of Polkadot’s three-pillar scalability upgrade, alongside:
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Async Backing: reduced parachain block time to 6 seconds and increased block size, unlocking an 8–10x throughput boost.
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Agile Coretime: replaced auctions with an on-demand marketplace for blockspace, making it easier and cheaper for parachains to access cores.
Together, these upgrades make Polkadot rollups up to 3× more performant on average, with up to 20MB/s bandwidth availability, delivering a user experience very close to Web2.
Important to Note
Elastic Scaling is not a mandatory upgrade; it depends on your application architecture and the service you want to provide your customers. Some parachains may not need multiple cores, while others may see it as a game-changer for their growth and user experience. At the same time, developers are invited to come and work with the new stack and build on Polkadot.
What should parachain teams do next?
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Review the updated Elastic Scaling Guide to understand how to enable it.
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Make sure to test thoroughly before going live.
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Evaluate whether your chain benefits from multi-core scaling based on your workload and user demand.
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Share feedback on this forum post from your deployments so we can continue refining the ecosystem.
Elastic Scaling completes the trilogy of Polkadot upgrades, delivering the scalability properties required to merge Web2 speed with Web3 truth. This is a significant step forward in Polkadot’s evolution, bringing us closer to a truly scalable, application-rich network.
We’re excited to see how parachain teams will utilize Elastic Scaling.