Polkafoundry ($PKF): creating NFT and DeFi apps on Polkadot?

Polkadot decentralised applications (DApps) have been amongst the most decent performing crypto assets in the last couple of months. Their popularity stems from the fact that they are cross-chain compatible and future-proof to a certain extent. However, there is a catch.

Contrary to the popular belief, the Polkadot blockchain hasn’t yet launched fully. While it’s a great concept being skillfully deployed, much remains to be done. In the absence of a live product, the developers need extra tooling and support to design and test their products. Enter PolkaFoundry.

This article takes a look at PolkaFoundry, its background, and history, as well as its main features and architecture.

Background

PolkaFoundry is a project founded in 2018 and led by an experienced crypto team, who has dealt in the blockchain industry for a long period of time. Its CEO and co-founder is Thi Truong, who served as a senior manager with famed AMM and liquidity aggregator Kyber Network before. Ron Nguyen is the head of partnerships, having extensive experience in marketing.

Other important members are Trang Mai (Head of Research & Development), Huy Hoang (Head of Platform Services), and Luong Hoa (Lead Engineer). The project is backed by some of the most respected and well-known funds including Signum Capital, Master Ventures, and AU21 Capital.

What is PolkaFoundry?

PolkaFoundry is a DApp factory and sandbox type project, which enables developers to design and test their Polkadot inter-operable projects. It aims to connect DeFi and Web 3.0 with the Polkadot ecosystem, by offering tools and services for experiments and real-world solutions. This will enable in-depth exploration and new innovations in the field.

It consists of a public blockchain (PolkaFoundry blockchain), identity service (PolkaID), document storage service (DocuGuard), and Oracle service (Decentralized Gate). All of these would enable developers to design and test powerful concepts/products with ease.

What is PolkaFoundry?
What is PolkaFoundry? (Image credit: PolkaFoundry)

System Features

The platform’s main features are utilizing extensive and powerful Polkadot ecosystem through interoperability and high scalability of Polkadot & Substrate. Since it’s compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), it’s possible for developers to migrate, without much changes to their existing code.

PolkaFoundry has unique user experience enabling features, which allows it to deploy the built DApps to a large number of users. Plus, the built-in support for decentralized finance (DeFi) ensures that developers don’t have to design anything from the scratch for managing identities, store files, and process oracle data.

PolkaFoundry Architecture

The general architecture of the PolkaFoundry project is an account-based system, unlike Bitcoin’s unspent transaction outputs (UTXO) system. It functions mostly like the Ethereum blockchain, using the same logic and execution functions.

The PolkaFoundry platform doesn’t have any distinction between a coin and a token. For all intents and purposes, they are essentially the same. It’s one of the main differences it has with the Ethereum blockchain.

It uses the following components : a Tendermint Core for P2P consensus and transaction raw data management, a transaction analyzer and executor, contract execution engine, and a bunch of other blockchain features.

Use Cases

The platform introduces a variety of use cases including but not limited to open lending, decentralized insurance, cross-chain DEX, DeFi derivatives, prediction markets, and auction marketplaces.

It’s essentially valid and useful for all applications requiring the intersection of Web 3.0 and the decentralized finance (DeFi) world. It is expected that interesting and unique projects would come out of this software factory.

PKF Token

PolkaFoundry’s native token is PKF, which is an Ethereum ERC-20 standard token. Later, once the PolkaFoundry blockchain launches, it will be swapped for the mainnet asset on a 1:1 basis.

PKF is utilized for transaction fees payment, staking purposes, reward issuance, governance proposals, and payment for services on the PolkaFoundry blockchain.

The total PKF supply is 200,000,000 (200M) tokens. Since the project has received major funding from different funds, it has a vesting schedule for the privately sold tokens.

The team or founders’ tokens are released in the same manner, granting legitimacy and protecting investor rights. There are specific allocations made for the foundation, ecosystem, and para-chain rewards.

PolkaFoundry Investment Funds

The PolkaFoundy Investment Funds is where things get more interesting as the investment data shows that the project is highly sought after by funds and investment groups, which is exactly why it has received investments from Signum Capital, Spark Capital, Master Ventures, AU21 Capital, x21, Magnus Capital, Rarestone, DuckDAO, Block Dream Fund, DFG, Youbi Capital, PNYX Ventures, M6, Lotus Capital, Blocksync Ventures, Vendetta Capital, Crypto Dorm Fund, Black Edge and Gestalt Capital.

PolkaFoundry Governance

After the mainnet launch, the governance of the platform will be transferred to the PolkaFoundry foundation. According to the documentation, it will be designed so that the protocol can handle emergency situations and be carried on-chain through a proper voting procedure.

It has been divided into the childhood phase and maturity phase. During the childhood phase, a proposal can be made by anyone, but only validators can vote on it. Once the blockchain enters the maturity phase, everyone can vote on proposals.

A validator has the power of his own stake and other people’s delegated stake. The stake can be slashed, in case the validators don’t vote in time. These proposals can come from every one without any special requirements. The PolkaFoundry governance can vote on important parameter modifications, emergency state declarations, and advanced changes to the protocol.

Conclusion

The Polkadot project is slated to be a leading project and one of the most developed and ongoing crypto marvels of the coming times. In the absence of a working mainnet, it needs a sandboxed environment and a factory to churn out DApp products.

And PolkaFoundry is stepping up to fill that role. The project offers robust tools, services, and design aids to help develop optimized concepts & final products for the Polkadot ecosystem.

It’s a solid project with widespread name recognition and industry backing. However, it remains to be seen as to how the platform would execute and deliver upon its concept. PolkaFoundry deployment isn’t yet complete and the mainnet launch is expected soon. After the launch, the token migration will take place through a bridge.

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