Polkadot's 'Ethereum Killer' Label Fades Amid New Upgrades and Ethereum Shift

Polkadot was once hailed as an 'Ethereum killer' due to its innovative design that addressed Ethereum's scaling issues through connected, independent blockchains.

The label stuck for about a year after it was given by Bloomberg in December 2020, but the comparison between the two networks changed when Ethereum chose a different scaling path using Layer 2 rollups.

Polkadot's architecture rests on three parts: the relay chain, parachains, and bridges. Gavin Wood, Polkadot's co-founder and former CTO of Ethereum, designed the network to solve scaling problems through sharding, but after leaving Ethereum in 2016, he built his own version with a more modular design.

Polkadot replaced its parachain auction system with Agile Coretime, which allows projects to buy computing time in smaller chunks instead of multi-year leases. The bigger change ahead is JAM (Join-Accumulate Machine), approved by a near-unanimous $DOT holder vote in May 2024, which aims to replace the relay chain with a more modular design.