I know the focus these days is on Bitcoin crashing and whether it's going to recover or not, but I wanted to make sure that didn't completely steal the show from Polkadot! Their team has been hard at work getting all of their Smart Contract code (currently running on Kusama) ready to launch. They're in the process of conducting auctions rn and will launch the first 5 parachains on December 18th! That means real, live smart contracts running on the DOT network... finally!

To commemorate this momentous occasion, I thought I'd share some info I've compiled!

Some interesting DOT facts:

• Founded by Gavin Wood. Gavin was the co-founder of Ethereum alongside Vitalik. He invented the Solidity programming language which powers all of Ethereum.
• Integrating with Facebook's Diem via bridge - https://pontem.network/
• More active developers on it than every blockchain except Ethereum. 75% more developers than Ethereum when they were the same age. There are 400% more active developers on Polkadot than Cardano. See this report by Electrical Capital Group: https://medium.com/electric-capital/electric-capital-developer-report-2020-9417165c6444 Slide 99 if you just want to skim.
• Has a real money, beta-testing blockchain called Kusama. You have a strong guarantee that any parachain of DOT will have been battletested against strongly incentivized adversaries.
• Has some crazy tech like the ability to self-upgrade without needing to hard fork. For example, DOT changed its base denomination without needing to fork. Contrast this with the process of converting LEND to AAVE - that was a hard fork requiring users manually submit transactions or be left behind. Expect more upgrades that are impossible for most protocols to do without forking. https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/en/learn-launch#core-functionality
• Polkadot's equivalent of ICOs, Parachain Lease Offerings, are starting to roll out. You loan money instead of buying outright. You get alt coin tokens immediately and your DOT back ~months later. You can check out the auctions for yourself! https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=wss://rpc.polkadot.io#/parachains/crowdloan
• The DOT ecosystem is 50 billion, https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/dot-ecosystem.
• There are some very serious projects launching via the PLO system within the next month. Moonbeam, https://moonbeam.network/, and Acala, https://acala.network/. These projects have already launched sister tokens against Kusama. Moonbeam is a bridge to Ethereum. Acala is the leading stable coin for the DOT ecosystem.
• https://playground.substrate.dev/ allows engineers to get started building in-browser. This level of developer support is peerless in the crypto ecosystem.

Happy trading out there everybody! <3