What is Polkadot's Agile Coretime?

The Polkadot network is made up of customizable Layer 1 networks called parachains, which are built on top of Polkadot’s base layer known as the Relay chain. Polkadot can support up to 100 different parachains, and each requires their own parachain slot.

Previously, for a parachain to go live on Polkadot, teams had to secure one of the limited parachain slots via an auction.

In December 2023, Polkadot Co-Founder Gavin Wood announced that slot auctions will be sunset in order to lower the barrier-to-entry for development teams, and improve efficiency. The new model for allocating parachains is called Agile Coretime.

In Polkadot 1.0, projects who wanted to operate in parachains had to rent a lease through an auction. Parachains could be leased for up to two years. This involved locking significant amount of DOT, leading to a high barrier of entry.

The parachains produced blocks at a regular interval of 12 seconds, irrespective of the network activity. That meant chains could produce empty blocks when there was lighter traffic, while they lacked the flexibility to produce more blocks when there was higher traffic.

Agile Coretime aims to resolve these challenges by enabling the purchase of Coretime (which is akin to blockspace) in “bulk." Each Coretime bulk has a duration of 28 days, and is represented by an NFT that can be split, shared and resold, allowing for secondary markets to thrive and improve the allocation efficiency of Coretime.

Parachains can seamlessly “renew” the core each month. There's also the possibility to pay for Coretime on-demand, with the minimum lease as as short as 1 block.

A move away from leasing auction slots and towards agile coretime marks the commoditization of Polkadot’s blockspace, and will allow for the market to determine its value as opposed to an auction.