Polkadot Boulevard, an L2 "system" chain on Ethereum ⛓️

[decentration]

You can take the horse to water but you can’t get it to drink…

…well how about we bring the water to the horse

The boulevard leading to the plaza

Bases in other places

All roads lead to Rome, and (early) Rome in this instance is Polkadot. And the Plaza is where the alchemists congregate and sip polka’spresso, before going back to work manifesting blockchain innovation that resides far beyond the crypto chattel’s paradigm of imagination.

We know and believe that JAM will give Polkadot supreme powers far beyond the conventional blockchain. But blowing people’s minds is a double edged sword. We learned this with relay/parachains. In theory, the rational informed mind should come in swathes to the island of superior-more-robust-and-more-principled-blockchain-protocol, where parachains with pallets provide the space of flexibility from the puny conventional smart contract world.

We know that Pallets can basically have its way with the runtime and state storage, such as storing and scheduling functionality, something as simple as:

if x then do y at z time

…which is an on-chain process that can be done with a pallet, an evm cannot do!

they are limited to do:

if x then do y in this current block only

Smart contracts are stuck in a blob somewhere sandboxed in limited area of the runtime/storage.

But with all this innovation within the almost-secret base of polkadot, mass adoption has not ensued (yet). Therefore, to get into the mind of people is to understand that technical rationality may not be the primary driver of human behaviour.

So here’s the beginning of an imaginative idea that might be a controversial one and hopefully divide opinion…

‘Polkadot Boulevard’

Whereas AssetHub becomes the Plaza. The Polkadot L2 is the “Boulevard” that leads to the Plaza.

A Polkadot L2 on Ethereum. This would not just be potentially a marketers moist fantasy, getting close to those oh-so-in-demand ethereum normies, but it could also add utility in ways that the open gov’d organism of polkadot can realise over time.

The Polkadot L2 Boulevard chain is like an army base sitting within allied foreign territory. A place where we can orchestrate propaganda campaigns and propagate them on the radios across the ether space.

• Showcasing the power of a substrate based chain on Ethereum, with EVM and pallets, essentially taking the features of Plaza (Asset Hub), and adding them into a L2 substrate chain.

Polkadot has become RnD

There are more than a few parachain projects that have made their polkadot endevours the “Rnd” department of their general project strategy, moving back to Ethereum L2 world (for now…). But strangely not many of them are launching substrate based chains as their L2, which I find surprising. Well, Polkadot could in a way be the Rnd department of Polkadot.

• A place to congregate. As many Polkadot parachain projects have moved to Ethereum in the short term, they can use Polkadot Boulevard as a base that links all the RnD they have done on Polkadot and not let it be so disconnected from their new eigen layeresque strategy.

Polkadot L2 features:

• Substrate chain features:

  • Pallets: Already supported well maintained pallets. (More or less the plaza pallets)
  • Open Gov standalone and/or connected governance
  • Runtime upgrades.
  • All the “basic” polkadot stuff that is still eons ahead of the underdeveloped “third world” of blockchain spaces, which is still probably undervalued and under marketed to the wider audience. As we can see from the most “innovative” of L2 comms who stumble across technical/design improvements many years later than polkadot.
  • Future: A complementary JAM engine, which brings the power of JAM to the Ethereum schelling point.
  • etc < please add/remove/update >

• Rollup feature:

  • An upgradable rollup feature that specialists polkadot community can test out.

How might Polkadot launch an L2 chain on Ethereum?

With governance approval

1. Treasury proposal, which gets official community approval to launch the chain.
2. A system chain which has the DOT token in the same way Plaza (Asset Hub) has its own token.

---

Influenced by:

• Rob Habermeirs Polkadot Plaza:

  Here’s to doing things that don’t scale, but scale far enough to get us to the next era.

  Do things that don’t scale, and deal with technical issues whenever they arise.

• hovering around the fresh yet raw ideas of early sourabh

• the crazy yet-so-simple idea of renaming “parachains” to “rollups”, which i think is a great way to reduce the need for the 100,000s of people who understand rollup to have to understand new nomenclature.

To conclude, there is value in exploring setting up a base in Ethereum. “A Polkadot Boulevard”.

If this piqued your imagination or triggered you, feel please have the psychological safety to share your thoughts.

…as i fizzle away into the crowd to get back to work on https://bagpipes.io and Blinks.

[Mork]

TL;DR - this is a no-brainer. Let’s do it.

Classic long version:

Polkadot, no matter how cultishly we pretend not to notice, did not gain acceptance as an ‘L0’. It is way more understandable as an ‘L1’ and the parachains as ‘rollups’ or 'L2’s.

Even ‘L1’ is not necessarily a term worth fighting to be known as. It puts us on a level with any number of smaller chains, even also-rans from the 2017 cycle.

I would be proud to have Polkadot as an ‘L2’ competing in the L2 wars with the likes of ZKsync, Arbitrum and Optimism, all of which have their own technical innovations and advantages which … guess what … are orders of magnitude less advantageous than what Polkadot offers.

There is also the inherent visibility that comes with being an Ethereum L2.

On the question of ‘if we should’, I don’t think there is much more I need to say.

On the question of ‘how’ …
We are going through technical changes (as ever ) and may soon have EVM contracts on Asset Hub, which also may become the primary ‘Polkadot’ chain. There’s Snowbridge too.
We are both empowered and limited by the technical choices we have recently made.

In a perfect world, I would like to see, for 3rd party compatibility’s sake, a ‘sendToL1’ / ‘sendToL2’ kind of functionality that some Eth L2’s have … functionally it’s not that it’s not ‘bridging’, it’s just that it’s not known as bridging, and gives the impression of a more seamless, more reliable connection. I’m not sure if this is immediately possible with, say, AssetHub and Snowbridge? I would hope that it would be a matter of not much more than a layer of UX abstraction.

In a really perfect world I’d like to see synchronous, or at least some mock-up of synchronous interaction with EVM contracts but somethings are too much to ask for

I’m not sure that ‘Polkadot Boulevard’ is something that even needs to be funded by the Treasury and built ‘in-house’ (or the decentralised version thereof) - though that would probably be the wisest way to do it.
Polkadot has a huge - huge - number of advantages to offer other chains. Whether they will gain that advantage by connecting to us, or us connecting to them, whether tight or loose connection, or whether by simply stealing (it’s not stealing when it’s open source :p) and integrating those advantages without any reference to Polkadot … Polkadot’s advantages will bleed to other chains sooner or later.
One way this may happen is through some entrepreneur creating an Ethereum L2 secured by, and with access to, Polkadot. If this were to happen, we could not realistically stop it and, indeed, would have little choice but to actively support it.

So … I would hope that ‘Polkadot as Ethereum L2’ gets funded and built as a public good with some responsibility to (and ownership by) the ecosystem, rather than as something like Moonbeam (great project but subject to its own internal business needs) or by something like Wormhole (gives only marginally greater than zero fucks about either the Polkadot eco, or about issues like security and decentralisation).