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The Origins of Polkadot

Polkadot was conceptualized by Dr. Gavin Wood, a co-founder of Ethereum and the creator of the Solidity smart contract language. In October 2016, Dr. Wood released the initial version of the Polkadot white paper, outlining his vision for a sharded version of Ethereum.

In 2017, Dr. Wood and Peter Czaban established the Web3 Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the research and development of Polkadot. The foundation conducted Polkadot's inaugural token sale in October 2017, raising an impressive $145 million within just two weeks. Parity Technologies was chosen to lead the development of Polkadot.

Parity Technologies, co-founded by Dr. Wood and Jutta Steiner, is renowned for maintaining the Parity Ethereum client and developing Substrate, the framework on which Polkadot is built.

Addressing Challenges and Fundraising Efforts

Following the token sale, the Parity multisig contract encountered a security breach, resulting in the loss of more than $90 million worth of ETH. Polkadot and the Web3 Foundation appealed to the Ethereum community for assistance in recovering the funds, but a resolution has not yet been reached. Despite this setback, the project has assured stakeholders that it possesses sufficient funds to achieve its development milestones.

To recover the lost funds, the Web3 Foundation conducted a private token sale in 2019, which successfully generated capital to support the ongoing development of Polkadot.

Technical Progress and the Launch of the Mainnet

In May 2018, Polkadot commenced the rollout of proofs-of-concept (PoCs) to test its base relay chain, parachain support, and the GRANDPA finality agent. The Alexander testnet was introduced in January 2019. The launch of Kusama in August 2019 marked a significant milestone for Polkadot, serving as a testing environment for governance, staking, and sharding.

Polkadot employed a staged rollout strategy for its mainnet launch. Phase 1, launched on $2, operated as a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) network managed by six validators. Phase 2 transitioned the network to Nominated Proof-of-Stake (PoS), allowing DOT owners to claim validator slots and staking rewards. Phases 3 and 4 introduced governance functionality and transferred control of the protocol to the community. The final phase will enable DOT token transfers.

The Web3 Foundation continues to allocate funds from DOT sales to support ecosystem initiatives and assist projects built on Polkadot. The foundation's governance structure consists of the Foundation Council, comprising Dr. Gavin Wood (President and Founder), Dr. Aeron Buchanan (Vice President), and Reto Trinkler.