What’s happening? 

peaq wins Polkadot’s parachain auction #45, propelled to the top by the community contributing  207,141 $DOT ($1+ million) across 749 contributors.

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Why does it matter? 

The win grants peaq a lease of a parachain slot for a 96-week period starting from July 31, which is a crucial step toward the mainnet launch on Polkadot, as peaq will launch as a layer-1 parachain.

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What does it mean for the community?

With a slot secured, peaq is one major stride closer to bringing its vision to life — and those who joined the crowdloan will begin earning their $PEAQ tokens once the network is launched.

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For many in the community, this auction season on Polkadot has been nothing short of an emotional rollercoaster. The fact that there were only two slots up for grabs (not four) made things intense from the get-go. While the first slot in the batch went to Moonbeam (congrats!), things looked pretty solid for the second one… Until a bug prevented it from kicking off.

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It was a dramatic plot-twist, and we were preparing for the worst. We warned the community that despite the clear lead of our crowdloan, we may have to re-open it for the next batch. After all, there’d be 7 parachain slots on offer there, so peaq would be able to get one, the thinking was.

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But what do you know, the tides turn fast. The Polkadot community rallied to run a referendum setting up another auction. It passed quickly enough for peaq’s crowdloan to remain valid for the duration of this delayed auction. And now, here we go — with utmost gratitude to all those who cast their votes in the referendum and those who backed peaq’s bid at the auction, we’re happy to announce that peaq has its parachain slot on Polkadot. 

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The rocketship is on the launchpad, ready for takeoff.

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Polkadot auctions 101

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Those of you who’ve been with peaq for a while can skip this section. This one is for the newcomers, to help them make sense of all the drama above and get them up to speed on Polkadot and its language.

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Polkadot is a layer-0 network bringing together multiple mission-specific layer-1 blockchains. Think of it as Polkadot being the hub and the chains — parachains, as they’re called here — being the spokes. The idea behind this is to enable the parachains to talk to one another and give them more security.

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Now, to link with the hub chain, or Relay Chain, as it is known, a layer-1 has to get a slot on it. Networks bid for these slots, limited to about 100, at special auctions, using Polkadot’s native $DOT token. The community behind a parachain can back it up by locking their own $DOT tokens into the project’s crowdloan. Note that the tokens don’t go away, they are just locked for the duration of the slot lease, which is two years. Crowdloan contributors usually get rewards in the native token of the projects they back.

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Auction overview

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First, the details. Auction #45 was supposed to run from July 1 until July 8, but was moved to the period between July 7 and July 13. The victory grants peaq a parachain slot on Polkadot’s Relay Chain for a two-year period. More specifically, peaq’s slot will be available starting from July 31, 2023, and wrapping up on June 5, 2025.

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The above period is also how long all of those who joined our crowdloan will have their $DOT tokens locked in the escrow wallet. Once the slot lease expires, crowdloan contributors will also get their locked $DOT tokens backed automatically. Our backers will also receive rewards in $PEAQ on a 12-month linear vesting schedule. With the first two milestones unlocked, all contributors will receive an additional 3% tokens on top of other bonuses. You can find a detailed breakdown of contributor rewards here along with other crowdloan details and peaq’s tokenomics. 

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As we are currently focused on building peaq into a mature network both in terms of tech and adoption, setting it up for a strong launch, bringing the mainnet live will take some time. We expect the launch and the $PEAQ token generation event to take place in Q1 2024. And, as extra good news for peaq crowdloan contributors, there will be a $KREST airdrop for them too — more details soon.

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The backbone for the Economy of Things

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The parachain auction win is a crucial step toward the mainnet launch. Once live, peaq will be the backbone for the Economy of Things, a sprawling ecosystem of dApps and services leveraging connected machines to create real-world value. It will run in tandem with krest, its live canary network, working as the main production-grade environment for user-facing dApps.

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The mainnet will be the final destination for dApps in the ecosystem, working their way from the pilot launches on the testnet and through the first experiments and live-fire tests on krest. It will be home to projects that aim for real-world services, disrupting a vast spectrum of industries from mobility to energy. It will also work as the layer-1 for decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), which crowdsource the deployment of physical hardware and machines via token incentives. All of peaq’s integrations, including multi-chain Machine IDs powered by Fetch.ai’s AI agents, will be live on the mainnet, and already include:

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  • ELOOP, which is running a Web3 Tesla-sharing service,
  • NATIX, which is running community-sourced street mapping platform, 
  • bloXmove, which has recently launched its Web3 ride-hailing dApp in Nigeria,
  • Wicrypt, a decentralized Web access network with hotspots in 30+ countries, 
  • Dozens of other dApps and DePINs in the pipeline that we will be announcing over the coming months.

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If you didn’t manage to join the crowdloan — don’t worry, as there will be more opportunities to earn rewards in $PEAQ. We will have more community-focused initiatives and opportunities coming out soon, so make sure to stay in touch. And pop the champagne open too while you’re at it, join us in celebrating this win.

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Building on a Web3 supercomputer 

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So as we’re sipping on the champagne, let’s check our crystal ball for what lies ahead. After all, the wider Polkadot space could be in for some major changes, which is important for the peaqosystem… Wait, why is it showing a paper tissue?

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We’ll never know if it was an homage to Joan Rowlings (or Ernest Hemingway). Either way, for his keynote at Polkadot Decoded, Dr. Gavin Wood, co-founder of Polkadot, indeed rolled with a few hand-drawn napkin illustrations. And oh boy are we excited about the ideas these pictures conveyed.

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At the core of Gavin’s vision for Polkadot’s future is its vision as a Web3 multi-core supercomputer. Layer-1 networks like peaq can leverage its computational power, as much as they need, and pay for it in #DOT. Layer-1s can shop for it in bulk or on-demand, to handle activity upticks. All this would take place instead of the auction process that we spoke about earlier. 

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Why is that massive? The answer is simple: Scalability. The ability to shop for computational power on-demand enables any layer-1 parachain to scale at will. Need more transactions per second? Sure, just rent a few extra cores. 

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Now, peaq is the network for the Economy of Things: Web3 Uber, community-owned power grids, drone delivery networks, and more. Most of this stuff runs on microtransactions. Many, many microtransactions, thousands and thousands per second with enough people using them. So scalable throughput — ability to process transactions — is a must. And that’s what makes this update such a big deal for peaq. As more and more projects join the peaqosystem, scalability grows more important by the day. Polkadot’s future updates bring peaq just that, setting it on a strong and versatile foundation to take on other high-performance layer-1s, competing with them on fundamentals like scalability and speed.

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Join the Economy of Things

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