Polkadot Teases JAM Protocol As Replacement For Relay Chain

Polkadot founder Gavin Wood has introduced the Gray Paper that outlines the upcoming Join-Accumulate Machine (JAM) upgrade for the network.

Wood made the announcement during his presentation on Polkadot’s future at the Token2049 crypto conference in Dubai. 

The Future Of Polkadot

According to Wood, JAM is a groundbreaking protocol that merges elements from Polkadot and Ethereum. In a post on X, Polkadot stated that the unveiling, coming a decade after the release of the Yellow Paper, is a significant evolution that will eventually replace Polkadot’s existing Relay Chain with a more modular and minimalistic design. 

“Earlier today @gavofyork unveiled the JAM Gray Paper. JAM is a protocol combining elements of both Polkadot and Ethereum. It is a prospective path to replace the Relay Chain with a more modular, minimalistic design.”

The entity behind Polkadot, Web3 Foundation, also announced a 10 million DOT prize pool to help foster greater diversity within the development of the JAM protocol. 

“The JAM Implementer’s Prize is designed to catalyze this by funding and supporting projects that contribute to the development of JAM implementations from the outset.”

A Decentralized Hybrid System 

JAM can be described as a decentralized hybrid system that is designed to offer secure and scalable smart contract functionalities by combining features from Ethereum within Polkadot’s architectural framework. 

“JAM is a protocol combining elements of both Polkadot and Ethereum. It is a prospective path to replace the Relay Chain with a more modular, minimalistic design.”

The Web3 Foundation further added that JAM would enable Polkadot to run generic “services” smart contract logic to process execution results on cores. A parachains service will also run on existing Substrate-based parachains. This will allow developers to still use Substrate to develop and deploy blockchains. JAM provides a global permissionless object environment similar to Ethereum’s smart contract environment and secure sideband computation parallelized over a scalable node network. According to one supporter, the JAM upgrade will allow Polkadot to become a true multi-core world computer that can handle any app or service without facing scalability, efficiency, or security issues. 

“[Polkadot] has already become a multi-core processor, but this was limited to parachains. The idea is to generalize this even further, to be utterly unopinionated about what and how things are deployed, turning all parachains, aka rollups, into an application layer service, with Polkadot transforming into something akin to cloud service infrastructure.”

The upgrade will continue to use Polkadot’s DOT token. After the announcement, DOT was able to buck its downward trend to a certain extent, rising by around 3%.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.