Polkadot (DOT) Launches Runtime Upgrade And The Unexpected Happened

The much-anticipated Polkadot runtime upgrade has gone live on the mainnet. Unusually, the upgrade triggered a sudden halt on the blockchain’s parachains.

Expectations from Polkadot Runtime Upgrade

According to one of its parachains, Moonbeam Network, the runtime upgrade on Polkadot triggered a cessation in block production on other competing parachains. Moonbeam confirmed that its parachain was one of the affected by approximately 10:27 am UTC on April 21. 

Ordinarily, the Polkadot runtime upgrade, like any other, is meant to change the logic of the chain without utilizing a hardfork. Based on a published statement on the Polkadot website, hard forking is slow and therefore, inefficient and prone to error. Generally, this outlook is contributed by the level of offline coordination that is required. 

Parachains get the ability to upgrade their runtime without hard forking by using Wasm in Substrate, the framework that powers Polkadot, Kusama, and many other connecting chains. Polkadot stores its runtime on its dedicated blockchain. 

“Polkadot can upgrade its runtime by upgrading the logic stored on-chain and removes the coordination challenge of requiring thousands of node operators to upgrade in advance of a given block number. Polkadot stakeholders propose and approve upgrades through the on-chain governance system, which also enacts them autonomously,” the protocol detailed.

While the downtime was encompassing, Moonbeam reported that it returned to active block productions about an hour later.

This is not an uncommon outage trend in the industry as others like Solana and Polygon are known to have recorded related upgrades that come with short-paced outages.

Polkadot and Multiple Outages

The Polkadot runtime upgrade follows an initial announcement to release JAM upgrade, a protocol that is meant to replace the Relay Chain interoperability protocol. In its entirety, this upgrade marks an evolution designed to usher in a more modular and minimalistic design. 

Apart from its effect on other parachains, the Polkadot runtime upgrade has not had any positive impact on the price of DOT, the native coin of the Polkadot ecosystem. At the time of this writing, DOT was trading at $7.06 with a 2.18% decrease within the last 24 hours. By reason of this drop, Polkadot has dropped from its daily high of $7.29 to its current level.