The Origin of Polkadot

Not long after Ethereum’s launch in July 2015, one of the blockchain’s co-founders, Gavin Wood, had a new vision for a smart contract enabled blockchain economy.

Wood’s vision focused on a web of specialized blockchains that function within a single unified network, allowing these distinct, customizable chains to focus on specific tasks while remaining interoperable. This structure is meant to promote the scalability and functionality of the economy.

Since then, these specialized chains have become known as parachains, tied together via the base layer, or Layer 0 Relay Chain.

With this focus, the Polkadot whitepaper was published in 2016 ahead of its initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017.

ICO and Launch

The Polkadot ICO went live in October 2017, and during its 12-day sale, the launch raised $145 million, selling 5 million DOT tokens at $0.29 per token. DOT currently trades for $4.21, over 14x the ICO price. However, the price went as high as $53 in 2021.

The Relay Chain then created its first-ever block, or genesis block, in May 2020, signifying the official launch of Polkadot’s mainnet.

The first parachains and their respective auctions went live a year and a half later in December 2021, introducing DeFi to the Polkadot ecosystem and marking the successful completion of Polkadot 1.0.

Following the Polkadot 1.0 rollout and the addition of OpenGov governance in 2023, Polkadot is now focused on a gradual series of upgrades that comprise Polkadot 2.0.

Founding Team

Polkadot was originally founded by Gavin Wood, Robert Haibermeier, and Peter Czaban.

Wood, the author of the whitepaper and face of the chain, is known for his previous role as a co-founder of Ethereum, as well as being the founder of Parity Technologies, originally known as Ethcore.

Parity is a blockchain software company which has assisted and led development efforts on Polkadot, such as the Polkadot software development kit (SDK).

Robert Haibermeier is one of the network’s founding engineers who spent seven years at Parity and created the lion’s share of the Proof-of-Stake and consensus code Polkadot uses.

Peter Czaban is the technology director of the Web3 Foundation, an organization set to develop and foster blockchain economies and dApps via research and grants. Upon the formation of the Web3 Foundation, Polkadot became the organization’s flagship project, with research and education related to the platform spearheaded by Czaban.