How does parachains works in Polkadot blockchain

Parachains are specific types of blockchains that reside in the Polkadot and Kusama networks. Polkadot nodes are slowly emerging as a prefered blockchain node of developers for designing decentralised and secure applications. The basic structure of the Polkadot and Kusama networks has a Relay chain and a lot of Parachains residing on it. Relay chain is the key component of these networks. Relay chain is a set of blocks which contain the information pertaining to the transactions and each block is connected to its preceding and successive block through the two ends. On the other hand, parachains are independent blockchains. They are connected to the relay chain in a way that they can use its computing resources to inspect the transaction data. Parachains play a very important role in providing security to the main relay chain.

How Parachains Work?

Polkadot and Kusama networks allow the transfer of both the data as well as the tokens. They allow users to create blockchains on their own that can be referred to as independent blockchains. So, clearly these networks are different from Ethereum where the decentralized applications are formed within some kind of boundation. Since parachains are linked to the relay chain, they do not need to rely on their own validator nodes. Rather they use collator nodes for the maintenance purpose. Collator nodes have two functions, the first one is, they store the entire history of every single parachain and the second is, they aggregate the whole data so that it could be added to the relay chain.

The introduction of parachains has a revolutionising impact on the world of blockchain technology. All the related services and the benefits of blockchain technology can be deployed through a blockchain service. Zeeve is one such blockchain node provider company that offers a variety of services, including availability, reliability, automated management and compliance, security and scalability.

What Is Polkadot?

Polkadot operates through two types of blockchains. The first network is the main network known by the name “relay chain” and the other set of networks is that of the user-created networks, known as the parachains. They have the following applications:

• the main network stores the transaction data permanently,
• while the user generated networks act as independent blockchains.

How Does Polkadot Work?

The two types of blockchains in the Polkadot network perform some specific functions. Let’s understand the working of Polkadot in the following way:

• The relay chain finalises the transactions. In order to maintain the speed, it performs the addition of new transactions and their validation separately.
• Parachains are customizable blockchains that rely on the relay chain to perform its function of inspecting the transactions by using the relay chain’s computing resources.
• The Polkadot relay chain uses a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus variation so that the network is in agreement with the state of the system.
• This variation in the consensus is called the nominated proof-of-stake (NPoS).
• The system locks the cryptocurrency in a specific way. This locking is done to perform two important functions and they are to validate the data in the parachain and to secure the relay chain. So, these functions are performed by the validators and the nominators respectively.
• Validators propose useful changes in the network and nominators perform the securing tasks by choosing trustworthy validators.

Conclusion

After going through the whole article you must have got a clear indication of the huge significance of parachains in the Polkadot blockchain. Parachains play a very important role in the formation of the Kusama and Polkadot networks as they have a wide range of functionalities that are customizable. And since their functionalities are customizable, they can be optimised for different types of use cases. In addition to this, they also have the ability of supporting their own tokens. With these useful features parachains can take the blockchain technology to the next level.