I am noticing that there’s a sizable amount of prospective builders out there who are afraid of building a parachain on Polkadot, due to the fact that they may lose their parachain slot after a certain period of time.
This fear is unfounded, as we know that a chain that is popular and is needed by a company would have no problems gathering the relay chain tokens required to auction for another slot. And if they cannot do so, then it is proof that their chain did not gain enough traction, and should then continue on using the pay-per-block model of a parathread.
Such a phenomenon makes me realize that there seems to be not enough venues in which we tell the story behind each and every game theoretic design decisions that went into every FRAME pallet. @shawntabrizi has been doing an excellent job in spreading the knowledge in his presentations, but it would seem that we need to have a more concerted effort in publishing the narrative. The first go-to location would obviously be the developer docs, but I feel that it isn’t quite enough. Thoughts?
My personal experience and observations are pretty much opposite. Due to too generous first crowdloans, which raised very high amounts of relay chain tokens, high competition in first rounds and unclear complexity of starting crowdloan and becoming parachain, devs start to think that:
it’s too expensive, yes you are reading it right
some parachains raised too much money in crowdloans (even crypto professionals are not aware of true nature of crowdloans which are not fundraising event but safe loan)
those big amounts of contributed assets didn’t help teams in any way
whole process is too nuanced and too much of hassle instead of being solochain or smart contract based protocol on smart contract chain
tldr; devs are afraid of idea even start as parachain. Imho we should focus and make bigger effort on education or debunking wrong narratives around crowdloans & parachains and highlight their strengths and unique value propositions. Then we can make them calm, that useful code & products will survive and will be appreciated in our ecosystem.