After Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood left Ethereum in 2016, he began writing a white paper for a new kind of blockchain, one that would use an innovative form of sharding and cross-chain communication to achieve the kind of scalability and interoperability. that Ethereum 1.0 could never manage. The new blockchain is Polkadot.

Polkadot intends to build a decentralized internet in which users can access any type of decentralized application or service. Its ability to connect with other networks makes this cryptocurrency more scalable.

In the same way, Ethereum 2.0 offers similar functions, but the Polkadot network offers greater guarantees to validate the transaction with fewer miners, in addition to making transactions faster.

Both ETH 2.0 and Polkadot use sharding to achieve scalability. Sharding involves partitioning the blockchain network, or its data, to allow parallel processing and thus increase performance. However, sharding is a broad term, and these two projects use different methods.

Polkadot offers a high level of interoperability that will not be possible with Ethereum 2.0, as only Ethereum-specific shards can be part of the Ethereum ecosystem. Polkadot uses bridge parachains that can connect to external blockchains, offering bidirectional compatibility.

 

The flexibility described above means that Polkadot offers a high level of interoperability that will not be possible with Ethereum 2.0, as only Ethereum-specific shards can be part of the Ethereum ecosystem. Polkadot uses bridge parachains that can connect to external blockchains, offering bidirectional compatibility.

Effectively, Ethereum could connect to the Polkadot ecosystem through a bridging parachain so that DApp developers can interact with any other Polkadot parachain. However, the reverse is not possible: Polkadot could not become an Ethereum Beacon Chain shard.
So far in the evolution of blockchain, interoperability has not played a major role. However, perhaps because so many blockchains have evolved interoperability is starting to play a bigger role since 2020. At the 2019 Blockstack Summit in San Francisco, blockchain entrepreneur Andreas Antonopoulos explained that any chain that attracts enough development will eventually eat itself up, requiring an infrastructure upgrade; in this case much of the current infrastructure, such as blockchain bridges or interoperable platforms like Polkadot, could be key enablers of the future development of Ethereum.

 

It will be interesting to see how these 2 platforms play together once the ETH 2.0 implementation is complete. If all goes well, each can complement the strengths of the other to create a connected blockchain network greater than the sum of its parts.