What Is Polkadot (DOT) Agile Coretime?

Agile Coretime facilitates the efficient utilization of network resources on Polkadot, providing greater economic flexibility for builders and generalizing Polkadot far beyond what was proposed in its whitepaper.

It allows Polkadot builders and users to innovate without boundaries, giving them access to the required blockspace for each stage of growth.

The Limitations In Polkadot 1.0

In Polkadot 1.0, the only way Polkadot could secure a parachain was by renting a lease through an auction. This guaranteed parachain block validation for up to two years but also involved locking up a significant amount of DOT tokens, leading to a high entry barrier for small and medium-scale blockchain projects. The parachains produced blocks at an interval of 12 seconds, irrespective of network activity. This was a problem because it led to inefficient resource allocation and misplaced economic incentives due to the production of near-empty blocks during lighter network traffic and the inability to accommodate heavier traffic.

How Agile Coretime Addresses These Issues

Agile Coretime solves these issues by enabling the purchase of coretime in bulk, with an allocation for one month. Parachains needing to author a block every 12 seconds (or 6 seconds using asynchronous backing) can renew the core monthly. Orders for coretime renewal take precedence over new orders while protecting against price fluctuations and enabling parachains to plan budgets and manage costs accordingly.

Coretime can also be split into smaller parts and sold, allowing secondary markets to function and thrive, thus significantly improving the allocation efficiency of coretime. Agile Coretime also offers an on-demand coretime functionality that allows the authoring of a parachain block on demand.

Agile Coretime Implementation

Coretime can be managed through the Broker Pallet, which is deployed on the Coretime Chain. The Polkadot Relay Chain is theoretically capable of supporting a hundred cores but can support even more through adequate optimizations. Preliminary testing successfully ran around 80 cores with 12-second block times.

What Are The Benefits Of Agile Coretime?

Coretime can be purchased directly through the Coretime Chain or through secondary marketplaces currently under development. There are two ways to purchase: on-demand and bulk. On-demand coretime will always be available at market conditions. On the other hand, bulk coretime can be purchased up to 28 days in advance. Additionally, bulk rewards are capped within a percentage of the previous purchase times.

Agile Coretime can potentially be a game changer for Web3, streamlining the utilization of resources and taking the economic flexibility for users and builders to the next level. It significantly lowers the entry barriers for small and medium-scale projects, allowing them to leverage Polkadot’s infrastructure to build on it. It also enables efficient resource use by maximizing blockspace utilization and minimizing wastage. Builders can also only pay for the resources they utilize. Coretime also facilitates strategic resource planning and price predictability. If bulk coretime is secured at a fixed time, fee spikes can be prevented during phases of high demand.

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.