Polkadot has been on a major building mission all year as a radical shakeup of its architecture has been accompanied by a slew of global hackathons to onboard developers in their droves. These efforts have begun bearing fruit and there’s now a major builder community coalescing around Polkadot’s sprawling web3 ecosystem. And there’s one piece of tech in particular that devs are keen to start experimenting with – JAM.
JAM Sweetens the Deal for Polkadot Devs
Join-Accumulate Machine (JAM) is a new system for scaling Polkadot by transforming the way parachains interact with the relay chain and making the entire ecosystem more scalable. More throughput, more computation, more use cases. All coupled with easier access for devs who will be able to rapidly create powerful dapps and even L2 networks powered by ZK rollups. Outlined in Dr Gavin Wood’s gray paper that was published in April, JAM aims to solve a lot of limitations with Polkadot’s current architecture while also expanding the ways in which it can be used to create onchain applications.
There are a lot of ingredients to JAM – too many to list here in fact – but here are just some of the flavors that this acronym brings to the table:
Greater performance: Parallel processing allows JAM to support 350 cores and transmit more than 2 Gps of data, a 3x improvement.
Higher throughput: 600x more transaction capacity than Ethereum and around 6x more than Solana.
Better smart contract integration: Smart contracts can operate autonomously and integrate with external environments more easily.
Native ZK rollups: These can be directly integrated into Polkadot, unlocking new use cases including enhanced privacy.
There’s a whole lot more to explore under the hood, but suffice to say that JAM isn’t just a blockchain upgrade: it’s a radical overhaul of the way Polkadot works.
Bounty Program Ups the Ante
To further raise anticipation for what JAM will bring to the developer community and – more importantly – to decentralized its implementation, Web3 Foundation is running a major bounty program. 10M DOT and 100,000 KSM are available to devs who create clients for interacting with the JAM protocol. More clients means more choice, more programming languages, and more frameworks for building applications that leverage JAM’s superpowers.
The implementation of diverse clients will provide a robust and decentralized foundation for interacting with JAM. To further ready Polkadot for its implementation, JAM Toaster is underway. This campaign takes simulates a JAM network running at full tilt with more than 1,000 nodes operating at capacity. It’s essentially a testbed designed to identify any issues in network behavior that could be caused by JAM’s introduction and will identify and eliminate edge cases.
JAM is a huge undertaking but one that’s being implemented with broad support from the Polkadot community, starting with its growing army of developers. It will reshape Polkadot’s architecture, incorporate several of Ethereum’s best characteristics, and deliver major breakthroughs in scalability and accessibility.
