Polkadot Alliance Pact: Protecting the Integrity of Our Relay Chains and Parachain Communities
Without a fairly deep and expert-led look at the website/whitepaper/code, it is difficult to distinguish between good and bad players in the ecosystem. I’d like to explore the idea of the Kusama and Polkadot councils agreeing on a pact as sovereign entities, to discourage bridging to rival Polkadot-style relay-chains. This initiative is based on the principle of the least number of relay chains (link below): a first step aiming to judge new potential relay chains connecting to the overall ecosystem.
The Polkadot and the Kusama Councils should aim to align efforts in protecting our community and, as representatives of passive stakeholders, make a pact outlining specific actions encouraging community members to support these initiatives.
In this spirit, the document below frames actionable items related to this goal. This post is open for feedback by the Council and community in general. Please note the principle of least number of relay chains, originally thought by Wei Tang, is useful to encourage a minimum number of relay chains in the ecosystem and to not spend resources to unnecessarily create new ones. After defining the principle, further points in the document try to define actionable items based on this. The pact is meant as a framework for action against relay chain projects that are not deem necessary at current network conditions: If additional infrastructure is not needed, but existing infrastructure can be used without drawbacks then we should keep using the existing infrastructure, and If something can be connected to an existing relay chain, then we should connect to it instead of creating a new relay chain.
This agreement has the ultimate goal of avoiding using resources from Polkadot and Kusama to develop these chains and providing any type of information to the community about proposals or teams whose roadmap includes this goal, as well as discouraging bridging to these.
The document can be found HERE.
Comments (4)
Comments (4)
Lend support to any external proposal or motion by any Council member on both chains aiming to block the bridging of the Polkadot ecosystem with a rival relay chain or Polkadot clone.
This part is not something I see myself agreeing to in any capacity. If a clone or alternative relay chain has the critical mass that Kusama or Polkadot lack, then it is in Kusama's and Polkadot's best interest to bridge to that chain. We should give legitimacy to popularity in order to reach the biggest number of users by any means necessary.
I also feel like this is a bit premature - we still have no indication of how the relay chain functionality of Polkadot and Kusama will work in production, and we might very well need a strong bridge to more capacity outside of our ecosystem. Going against it before any of this functionality is live is putting up moats that might harm adoption.
I'm going to preface all of this with the disclaimer that I understand the need to hold dishonest or unattributed forks of Polkadot and Substrate accountable, or even low-effort forks of Polkadot with little more than runtime modifications, that intend to perform Parasite attacks or similar. That said everything below is in the context of forks with significant novel features, or novel reimplementations of the idea of relay chains.
I'm working on a more thorough response to this - some folks here have seen a more... unpolished version of it - but one easy to understand criticism of this is:
(This is obviously an attempt at building a moat around Polkadot and Kusama,)
If Polkadot and Kusama refuse to engage with and/or support legitimate projects with similar goals, it will simply "lose" to a project that is willing to do so.
I find "the principle of least number of relay chains" naive and short-sighted - it does not represent the reality of what is probably going to happen - and ignoring that reality is shooting ourselves in the foot.
Substrate and the idea it represents was a Pandora's Box, and it is already opened.
Kusama while it exists to support Polkadot, also represents the idea of "an alternative relay chain with different properties than Polkadot", also was a Pandora's box - and it is already opened as well.
Similarly to Bruno I believe we should give legitimacy to the "most popular"/highest security chains - some thoughts: https://twitter.com/Jam10o/status/1362963012836065284
This part is not something I see myself agreeing to in any capacity. If a clone or alternative relay chain has the critical mass that Kusama or Polkadot lack, then it is in Kusama's and Polkadot's best interest to bridge to that chain. We should give legitimacy to popularity in order to reach the biggest number of users by any means necessary.
I also feel like this is a bit premature - we still have no indication of how the relay chain functionality of Polkadot and Kusama will work in production, and we might very well need a strong bridge to more capacity outside of our ecosystem. Going against it before any of this functionality is live is putting up moats that might harm adoption.
I'm going to preface all of this with the disclaimer that I understand the need to hold dishonest or unattributed forks of Polkadot and Substrate accountable, or even low-effort forks of Polkadot with little more than runtime modifications, that intend to perform Parasite attacks or similar. That said everything below is in the context of forks with significant novel features, or novel reimplementations of the idea of relay chains.
I'm working on a more thorough response to this - some folks here have seen a more... unpolished version of it - but one easy to understand criticism of this is:
(This is obviously an attempt at building a moat around Polkadot and Kusama,)
If Polkadot and Kusama refuse to engage with and/or support legitimate projects with similar goals, it will simply "lose" to a project that is willing to do so.
I find "the principle of least number of relay chains" naive and short-sighted - it does not represent the reality of what is probably going to happen - and ignoring that reality is shooting ourselves in the foot.
Substrate and the idea it represents was a Pandora's Box, and it is already opened.
Kusama while it exists to support Polkadot, also represents the idea of "an alternative relay chain with different properties than Polkadot", also was a Pandora's box - and it is already opened as well.
Similarly to Bruno I believe we should give legitimacy to the "most popular"/highest security chains - some thoughts: https://twitter.com/Jam10o/status/1362963012836065284