Here are some current thoughts which I am sharing, in the hopes of a “grassroots” movement around defining a strong vision for Polkadot.
TLDR: I really think we should think bigger. Talk about Web3 Applications and Services. Not parachains, or rollups, or whatever. Position Polkadot as the Web3 Cloud for the decentralized internet. We should be matching terms from AWS, Google Cloud, and really speak and dream bigger than what we have today, and more toward our long term vision.
There was a lot of positive feedback around my presentation at Tech Forum Argentina. (Perhaps biased, i guess i only see the people who post and repost my video)
They seem to resonate with the main images I shared here: Renaming "Parachains" to a More Generic Term - #14 by shawntabrizi
Positioning ourselves as a Web3 Cloud Provider seems to be extremely easy for people to understand, and DOES map well into what we are trying to do in the long term.
So when thinking about branding everything, it totally makes sense to pivot in this direction, and try to find a way to describe where we are going, not where we are at.
Vision Statement:
Polkadot is a platform for secure, scalable, and resilient Web3 applications and services.
My proposal is that the Polkadot platform has two core products:
- The Polkadot Hub (or maybe a more branded name, open to ideas)
- The Polkadot Cloud
NOTE: With this terminology, we never need to mention Plaza, JAM, Polkadot 2.0, or anything in between.
So what is the Hub and the Cloud?
The Polkadot Hub
The Polkadot Hub is the hub for the DOT token and the Polkadot ecosystem.
Through the hub, you get access to:
- DOT
- Staking
- OpenGov
- Treasury
- Stablecoins
- Other Universal Tokens
- DAOs which embody the community of Polkadot
- Account Abstractions
- Smart Contracts which can interface with all of the above
- and more!
The Polkadot Hub can also be a launchpad to build new products in the Polkadot ecosystem. You can acquire users, establish tokens, and eventually transition to the Polkadot Cloud if or when you need additional control or throughput.
The Polkadot Hub is deployed on the Polkadot Cloud, ensuring a secure, resilient, and scalable experience for all users in the Polkadot ecosystem.
The Polkadot Hub is name which captures, but also broadens the work we have been doing around Plaza, the Minimal Relay Chain, Smart Contracts on Polkadot, etc… Now we do not need to use these terms, and the Hub captures a vision MORE than any one of these specific ideas. It is something which will continue to get better upgrade to upgrade.
The Polkadot Cloud
The Polkadot Cloud is a scalable and resilient Web3 platform for Applications and Services. On the Polkadot Cloud, you are able to launch extremely high throughput applications and services, with native interoperability and shared security. Our cloud platform is, elastic, dynamic and multi-core. With over 100 execution cores we are able to achieve 150,000 transaction per second, and over 150 MB/s data availability throughput! You are able to use our cloud to scalably, cheaply, and easily deploy any kind of Web3 application or service.
The Polkadot Cloud is a name which captures, but also broadens the work we have done around building the relay chain and initially launching Parachains, Polkadot 2.0 (encompassing Agile Coretime, Elastic Scaling, Coretime Auctions, etc…), and even JAM.
What is important about these names is that they are Polkadot forward and Polkadot first.
Terminology
So going now back to the start of this thread, here are the core terms we should be using with these ideas:
- Polkadot Hub
- Contract (app on the hub)
- Polkadot Cloud
- Cloud Service (app on the cloud)
- Universal Tokens
Never say: polkadot 2.0, jam, or plaza
No need to say parachain, rollup, etc…
With every feature, or milestone, we are one step closer to a more feature rich Polkadot Hub, and a more powerful scalable Polkadot Cloud.
Here are these terms used in Headlines:
- “Introducing Ethereum Compatibility to the Polkadot Hub”
- “Introducing Staking and Governance, directly on the Polkadot Hub”
- “Introducing Universal Tokens on the Polkadot Hub”
- “Introducing Elastic Scaling to the Polkadot Cloud”
- “Introducing General Cloud Services to the Polkadot Cloud”
Here are these terms used in sentences:
- The Polkadot Cloud was first deployed in 2021 with the launch of Parachains.
- The Polkadot Cloud just completed Milestone 2 of its vision toward creating a scalable Web3 cloud server. This milestone introduced Elastic Scaling, On-Demand Payments, On-Demand Deployment, and more.
- With milestone 2 complete, all eyes are on Milestone 3, which will allow even non-blockchain applications and services to use the the Polkadot Cloud and provide more than 3x more computational bandwidth than milestone 2. You can learn more about Milestone 3, code name JAM, by reading the Gray paper
- The Polkadot Hub will soon get Ethereum compatible smart contracts, bringing general programmability to the DOT token. In combination with our Universal Tokens, the Hub is now the perfect place to launch your next project.
- On the Polkadot Hub, you can launch quickly and cheaply, and build a community around your project. As you need more flexibility or scalability, you can bring your project to the Polkadot Cloud and unlock the full power of Polkadot.
- The Polkadot Hub has access to USDC and USDT, which when paired with OpenGov, the Polkadot Treasury, and a large collection of active DAOs, makes Polakdot the largest decentralized Web3 community in the world.