This document provides an overview of an introductory course on Polkadot. It will take place over 9 months and cover topics like the technical overview of Polkadot, parachains, applications in society, and more. Events will be held weekly on Thursdays at 5:30pm GMT+1 and recorded. The course material will help educate people about Polkadot, a blockchain network that allows specialized blockchains called parachains to communicate and process transactions in parallel for improved scalability. Polkadot uses a relay chain and bridges to connect different chains together and achieve interoperability.

1. Starting soon

2. Encode Polkadot Club
Intro to Polkadot

3. About
Encode
We educate, support
and back university
and hacker talent in
blockchain.

4. Timeline overview
9 months
Education Hackathon Accelerator
July to Oct Oct to Dec Jan to April

5. Core details
Lasts July to August
Weekly events at Thurs 5.30pm
All happening online
Recorded and uploaded along with slides thereafter
Course material shared alongside the events to learn more

6. Week Event
1 Intro to Blockchain
2 Intro to Polkadot
3 Technical Overview of Polkadot
4 Intro to Substrate
Schedule
Week Event
5 Parachains
6 Non-technical involvement in Polkadot
7 Product Demos
8 Applications in society
Held weekly on a Thursday at 5.30pm GMT+1

7. De-ambiguating bitcoin
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency.
It is literally a currency that uses cryptography in some neat way.
It uses a piece of technology called blockchain.
Blockchain is a way for lots of people to cryptographically agree
that something has happened, without needing to trust a
central party.
Cryptography is a method of protecting information and
communications through the use of codes, so that only those
for whom the information is intended can read and process it.

8. A blockchain
is like a
spreadsheet

9. Features
Immutable Decentralised Trustless Incentivised
Open-source
Community
owned
Competitive Programmable

10. The result:
The system provides trust guarantees to
anyone using it (since nothing can be
computed without widespread agreement
of the nodes i.e. the consensus mechanism).

11. What is Polkadot?
A scalable blockchain made up of specialised
blockchains that communicate with each other.

12. History
Founded by Ethereum
co-founder Gavin Wood

13. Problems with Bitcoin and Ethereum
Communication
Scalability
Customisation
Upgradability

14. Scalability
Transactions per second
Bitcoin: 5 per second
Ethereum: 15 per second
Visa: 1700 per second

15. Transaction processing
Usually, blockchains process
transactions sequentially,
which can be a slow
process.

16. Upgradability
Everyone must upgrade
software before any major
change.

17. Parachains
Polkadot uses a sharded
model where shards called
‘parachains’ allow
transactions to be
processed in parallel.

18. Parachain examples
Acala - defi
Phala - privacy
Moonbeam - ethereum smart contracts
Chain X - cross chain assets
Plasm - dapp platform

19. Pooling security
As opposed to individual
chains.

20. Verifying
Parachains propose a
candidate block (a set of
transactions) to the relay
chain validators

21. Verifying
Validators of the Relay
Chain check the transaction
looks legitimate, before
sending to other validators,
where more than half need
to agree.

22. Increased throughput
Running transitions in
parallel allows more
transactions per second.

23. Relay Chain
All the transaction
information on the
parachains is sent to
the Relay Chain, the
main chain of the
system.

24. Interoperability
Ability to connect different
chains together.

25. The result
Lots of specialised
blockchains all co-existing
together under the same
umbrella.

26. Bridges
Polkadot uses bridges to
connect to other
blockchains that are
non-parachains (btc, eth)
and it’s cousin network,
Kusama

27. Putting this together
Relay chains: coordinate consensus and transaction
delivery between chains.
Parachains: constituent blockchains which gather and
process transactions.
Bridges: links to other blockchains with their own
consensus.

28. Substrate
Parachains on Polkadot are
built using Substrate, a
drag-and-drop framework
of different blockchain
features.

29. Kusama
Polkadot but for testing, it
exists as an independent
network.

30. DOT token
● Governance
● Staking to incentivise
good actors
● Bonding to create new
parachains

31. Staking
Polkadot uses NPoS
(nominated Proof of Stake)

32. Nominators and validators
As a nominator, you nominate
Validators.
Validators have to stake DOT and
are responsible for verifying
mosts of the transactions within
the Polkadot network

33. Technologies
- Rust programming language
- WebAssembly (for parachains)
- Libp2p (p2p protocol by Protocol Labs)

34. Explorer
- https://polkadot.js.org/apps/#/explorer

35. Polkaproject
- https://www.polkaproject.com/#/

36. Next week: Technical deep-dive

37. Thank you
anthony@encode.club