Polkadot Projects Forge Alliance to Protect Blockchain from Bad Actors

Seven basic projects include Acala, Astar and Interlay

Seven of Polkadot’s leading projects have joined forces to establish standards and ethics for open source development, the new collective said on 30 November.

Polkadot Alliance was founded by Acala, Astar, Interlay, Kilt, Moonbeam, Phala and Subscan, seven of the top projects occupying Polkadot’s parachain slot. That chain collective aims to support development standards and expose bad actors in the ecosystems of Polkadot and its sister canary chain, Kusama.

Standards and ethics

“At a time when credibility and viability are critical to the future of Web3… the community has a strong need for community-led standards and ethics,” the collective said in the announcement. “The Polkadot Alliance will have no governance powers, but seeks to protect the Polkadot brand, recognize ecosystem contributors, and maintain a code of ethics for the community.”

Ingo Rube, the founder of Kilt, a Polkadot-based identity service, told The Defiant that the idea for the Polkadot alliance has been brewing for more than a year. It started in response to rogue projects falsely claiming affiliation with the Polkadot ecosystem or rebranding open source as their own as the previous bull cycle heated up.

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“A lot of projects that didn’t really aim to be parachains… called [themselves] “Polka something,” collected money and then ran off with it,” Rube said. “It happened quite a bit [and] was not good for the Polkadot ecosystem.

Polkadot is a Layer 0 protocol that allows developers to build Layer 1 blockchains called “parachains” on top of Polkadot. They enjoy the shared security offered by Polkadot’s vast betting network.

Polkadot’s Layer 0 relay chain only supports asset transfers and staking functions, with parachains offering advanced and specialized functions such as smart contract execution or identity services.

Protect the name

Polkadot’s 100 parachain slots are issued to projects that unlock DOT network tokens over 6-month, 12-month or two-year lease periods. Ten parachains are reserves for infrastructure projects such as Subscan, which provides block explorer services for the Polkadot ecosystem.

“We have to protect the Polkadot name [and] enables people who build inside the ecosystem to have their intellectual property protected in a way,” Rube said. “In Polkadot, not a lot of crap has happened … There are a lot of very committed teams building really great things … I think we have a great chance … to establish the Polkadot ecosystem as utility is created.”

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Projects that are not founding “fellows” wishing to join the alliance can do so as “allies”, and can become voting members by unlocking 1000 DOT as a sign of their commitment to the project.

Rube encouraged other projects to join as voting allies, admitting that the alliance would be quite centralized if it only included the founders who passed judgment on which players are good and bad in the ecosystem.

“Maybe one of us is a bad actor and it should be possible to kick us out if we don’t do well, so we need to decentralize as much as possible,” Rube said.