What is JAM? Polkadot’s Biggest Ever Upgrade Explained

Introduced in April 2024, the Be a part of Accumulate Machine (JAM) represents the biggest-ever replace to Polkadot for the reason that blockchain first turned totally operational in 2021. It would deliver deep adjustments to the Relay Chain, the middle of the venture’s ecosystem, which underpins all its impartial parachains.

The JAM improve’s proposed technical ideas and goals have been outlined within the JAM Grey Paper, penned by Polkadot creator Gavin Wooden.

Polkadot depends on decentralized management to determine the way forward for the venture, and the proposed replace was confirmed after a near-unanimous vote of approval from DOT holders in Might 2024.

What’s JAM?

JAM is an improve to the Polkadot multi-chain community that goals to switch its Relay Chain with a “extra modular, minimalistic design.”

The Relay Chain is the principle chain of the Polkadot community, coordinating the parachains that course of transactions aspect by aspect on the community. It’s used to examine transaction addresses and standardize information so that each system can perceive it, enabling chains on the Polkadot community to pool safety.

JAM will allow Polkadot to “run generic “providers”, sensible contract logic which may course of the results of execution on cores,” in keeping with Polkadot’s founding group, the Web3 Basis.

In a departure from Polkadot’s current Relay Chain, JAM might be ‘permissionless’ in nature, enabling anybody to construct providers atop it.

This can be a departure from the complicated and investment-heavy present system the place builders need to bid for his or her leases at public sale, backed by their venture’s supporters, who stake their DOT tokens in help of the bid.

Much like how folks construct on Ethereum, builders will be capable to construct providers and sensible contracts with out bidding for them first. These new providers will then have interoperability with the remainder of the Polkadot ecosystem and can be capable to ship tokens and information between one another, similar to how present parachains perform.

Polkadot’s public sale system might be changed by Agile Coretime, a extra economically versatile mannequin that enables Polkadot customers to buy Coretime, the computational assets supplied by JAM, in bulk by the month.

Coretime, as soon as bought, can then be cut up up and offered into separate elements and resold on secondary markets, which can enhance the effectivity of the general marketplace for computing energy. All these Coretime transactions will use DOT, the native token of the Polkadot ecosystem.

In a way, JAM presents a mix of the parachain-focused performance of the unique model of Polkadot and the sensible contract-focused method of the present model of Ethereum. Gavin Wooden has described JAM as a “much less opinionated model” of Polkadot, because it would not attempt to push customers in direction of one method or the opposite.

Wooden thinks the brand new method supplied by JAM may assist take care of a number of the points round scaling that earlier blockchains have usually confronted, as their communities develop past a sure level when it comes to dimension, customers, and tasks.

What’s working JAM?

The JAM supercomputer—referred to as Polkadot Digital Machine (PVM)—will use RISC-V. That is an open-source and extensively adopted processor structure, used to develop customized processors for a wide range of functions and employed by companies together with Google, Nvidia, and Alibaba. It would change the WebAssembly-based framework at present utilized by Polkadot.

The mainframe is about to be given a take a look at run on a specifically constructed supercomputer known as the “Polkadot Palace”, in Lisbon, Portugal. The brand new supercomputer may have 12,276 cores and 16 TB of RAM and can be capable to host the total JAM community in its entirety.

If JAM is efficiently applied, Wooden predicts that JAM ought to be capable to obtain information availability of as much as 852Mb/s—roughly 42 instances the information availability of the vanilla model of Polkadot, previous to the introduction of Asynchronous Backing in Might 2024.

The Grey Paper estimates that when JAM is totally up and working, it is going to be in a position to obtain a processing capability of roughly 150 billion gasoline per second.

How will JAM change the Polkadot ecosystem?

In a Might 2024 podcast interview, Polkadot founder Gavin Wooden mentioned how he thinks being able to construct providers immediately on high of the Relay Chain may enhance the accessibility of the Polkadot ecosystem.

At current, there’s a arduous restrict of fifty parachains which will be hosted on the Relay Chain. Getting one among these restricted slots means going by the public sale course of, and having monetary backers, making the boundaries to entry comparatively excessive.

Like the present Relay Chain, the JAM chain itself may have nearly no performance of its personal. Features like governance, staking, and governance will as an alternative be constructed on these providers, with JAM offering the underlying inoperability that permits integration and operability.

JAM could possibly be merely described as a “distributed laptop,” which can be utilized to run nearly any process.

Wooden used how bees, petals, and flowers perform within the pure world as a metaphor to elucidate how JAM will perform. In nature, a flower is surrounded by petals. These petals are like cores, the bodily nodes of computer systems that energy the blockchain.

In JAM, the rollups—the providers constructed on JAM—are like bees, they usually freely transfer between the petals. This can be a departure from the unique model of Polkadot or zk-rollup Ethereum, the place the person petals (or cores) have been mapped one-on-one to the parachain they have been supporting.

In JAM, these versatile petals are “stateless”, and adapt to completely different features, relying on what’s required of them.

Each few seconds or so the flowers, which will be regarded as blocks, will create a consensus amongst all their completely different petals.

When will JAM launch?

It’s seemingly {that a} production-ready model of JAM will take at the least 20 to 60 months earlier than it’s able to deploy, not together with the multitude of providers which are set to be constructed on high of it.

Not like earlier updates to Polkadot, JAM won’t be launched by way of a gradual iterative method. The migration will occur all of sudden and as soon as it’s performed, it is performed.

The precise switchover gained’t imply something for folks passively holding DOT tokens, or seeking to commerce it. There gained’t be a spin-off forex or new altcoin, resembling within the case of Bitcoin Money in 2017 after the Bitcoin arduous fork, or when Ethereum Traditional first appeared in 2016.

What’s going to occur to current parachains?

JAM, although a big change to the Polkadot community, will not be what is called a tough fork.

Which means that the performance of any of the parachains at present working on Polkadot gained’t be impacted; a part of the JAM proposal features a assure round hard-coded compatibility.

However though present parachains will proceed to perform as regular, they are going to not be the one recreation on the town. Parachains will develop into simply one among many merchandise that may be run by the JAM chain.

Polkadot says that we’ll seemingly see use instances emerge that might be extra appropriate for parachains and others extra appropriate to be constructed as providers.

The Web3 basis has assured customers that parachains will stay “top notch residents” even post-JAM.

How can builders get entangled?

The Web3 basis might be incentivizing builders who work on implementing the JAM protocol.

The JAM Implementer’s Prize presents as much as 10 Million DOT—roughly $70 million at present costs—to builders who’re in a position to meet particular efficiency take a look at standards.

The prize plans to reward groups that efficiently work on various implementations, for instance utilizing different programming languages to Solidity, which the vast majority of present parachains are constructed on. These languages embody OCaml, Go, and Zig.

The Web3 Basis continues to be finalizing the small print of the appliance course of, however in case you are inquisitive about making use of for the prize you’ll be able to head right here for an early sign-up.