What is JAM? Polkadot’s Largest Upgrade Ever Explained

Announced in April 2024, the Join Accumulate Machine (JAM) represents the largest update ever. polka dot after blockchain It became fully operational for the first time in 2021. This will bring major changes to the relay chain, the heart of the project ecosystem that underpins all independent parachains.

The technical principles and goals proposed by the JAM upgrade are outlined in the JAM Gray Paper written by Polkadot creator Gavin Wood.

Polkadot relies on decentralized leadership to determine the future of the project, with proposed updates confirmed following a near-unanimous approval vote by DOT holders in May 2024.

What is JAM?

JAM is an upgrade of the Polkadot multi-chain network that aims to replace the Relay Chain with a “more modular and minimalistic design.”

The relay chain is the main chain of the Polkadot network and coordinates the parachains that process transactions side by side on the network. This is used to verify transaction addresses and standardize data so that all systems can understand it, allowing chains on the Polkadot network to be unsecured.

According to the Web3 Foundation, Polkadot’s founding organization, JAM allows Polkadot to run “generic “services,” which are smart contract logic that can process execution results at the core.

Breaking away from Polkadot’s existing relay chain, JAM is inherently ‘permissionless’, meaning anyone can build services on top of it.

This is a departure from the complex and investment-heavy current system, which requires developers to bid for leases in an auction, backed by project supporters who stake DOT tokens to support their bids.

It’s similar to the way people build buildings. EthereumDevelopers build services and smart contract Without bidding first. These new services will then have interoperability with the rest of the Polkadot ecosystem and allow them to send tokens and data to each other, similar to how parachains currently work.

Polkadot’s auction system will be replaced by Agile Coretime, a more economically flexible model that allows Polkadot users to purchase Coretime, computing resources provided by JAM, in bulk on a monthly basis.

Once you purchase a Coretime, you can split it up, sell it as separate parts, and resell it on the secondary market, which can improve the efficiency of the overall market for computing power. All these Coretime transactions use DOT, the native token of the Polkadot ecosystem.

In a sense, JAM offers a combination of the parachain-centric functionality of the original version of Polkadot and the smart contract-centric approach of the current version of Ethereum. Gavin Wood described JAM as a “less opinionated version” of Polkadot because it doesn’t force users into one approach or another.

Wood believes that the new approach offered by JAM can help deal with some of the challenges associated with scaling that previous blockchains often faced as communities grow beyond a certain point in terms of size, users, and projects.

What runs JAM?

The JAM supercomputer, known as the Polkadot Virtual Machine (PVM), uses RISC-V. It is used to develop custom processors for a variety of applications and is an open source and widely adopted processor architecture used by companies including Google, Nvidia, and Alibaba. It replaces the WebAssembly-based framework currently used by Polkadot.

The mainframe will be test run on a purpose-built supercomputer called “Polkadot Palace” in Lisbon, Portugal. The new supercomputer will have 12,276 cores and 16TB of RAM and can host the entire JAM network in its entirety.

If JAM is successfully implemented, Wood predicts that JAM could achieve data availability of up to 852 Mb/s. This is approximately 42 times the data availability of the vanilla version of Polkadot before the introduction of asynchronous backups in May 2024.

Gray Paper estimates that once fully operational, JAM could achieve a throughput capacity of approximately 150 billion gases per second.

How will JAM change the Polkadot ecosystem?

In a May 2024 podcast interview, Polkadot founder Gavin Wood discussed how he thought the ability to build services directly on top of the relay chain could improve the accessibility of the Polkadot ecosystem.

There is currently a limit of 50 parachains that can be hosted on a relay chain. Getting one of these limited slots means going through an auction process and having a financial backer, so the barrier to entry is relatively high.

Like the current relay chain, the JAM chain itself has very few features of its own. Functionality such as governance, staking, and governance are instead built on top of these services, and JAM provides the underlying inoperability to enable integration and operability.

JAM can be simply described as a “distributed computer” that can be used to run almost any task.

Wood used an analogy of how bees, petals, and flowers function in the natural world to explain how JAM functions. In nature, flowers are surrounded by petals. These petals are like the core, the physical node of the computer that runs the blockchain.

In JAM, rollups (services built on top of JAM) are like bees, moving freely between the petals. This is a departure from the original versions of Polkadot or zk-rollup Ethereum, where individual petals (or cores) were mapped one-to-one to the parachains they support.

In JAM, these versatile petals are “stateless” and adapt to different functions depending on what is needed.

Flowers, which can be thought of as blocks, create a consensus between different petals every few seconds.

When will JAM be released?

A production-ready version of JAM will likely take at least 20 to 60 months to be ready for deployment, not including the numerous services that will be built on top of it.

Unlike previous updates to Polkadot, JAM will not be introduced through an incremental, iterative approach. The migration happens all at once and is complete when it’s done.

The actual conversion will have no meaning for those who want to passively hold or trade DOT tokens. There will be no derivative currencies or new altcoins like: bitcoin cash After or when the Bitcoin hard fork in 2017 Ethereum Classic It first appeared in 2016.

What happens to existing parachains?

JAM made major changes to the Polkadot network, but it was not known as a hard fork.

This means that the functionality of parachains currently running on Polkadot will not be affected. Part of the JAM proposal includes guarantees of hard-coded compatibility.

However, while the current parachain continues to function normally, it is no longer the only game in town. Parachain will be one of many products that can operate on the JAM Chain.

Polkadot says parachains and other use cases better suited to building services are likely to emerge.

The Web3 Foundation assured users that parachains will remain “first-class citizens” even after JAM.

How can developers get involved?

The Web3 Foundation will provide incentives to developers who participate in the implementation of the JAM protocol.

The JAM Implementer Award provides up to 10 million DOT (about $70 million at current prices) to developers who can meet specific performance testing criteria.

The prize money is planned to reward teams that successfully carry out various implementations, for example using an alternative programming language to Solidity, on which most of the current parachains are built. These languages ​​include OCaml, Go, and Zig.

The Web3 Foundation is still finalizing the details of the application process, but if you are interested in applying for the prize, you can register early here.