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A proposed roadmap for upcoming developments on Polkadot. Get the latest status on asynchronous backing, parathreads, XCMv3, governance, common-good parachains and more.

The new paper Overview of Polkadot and its Design Considerations expands on the white paper, presenting a comprehensive and updated description of Polkadot’s design components and subprotocols. Some of these are outlined here.

So far, we have discussed how BABE creates blockchain candidates and GRANDPA finalizes them. We know that we need more than two-thirds of validators to properly follow the protocol. But how many validators are there? How are they chosen? Why should they follow the rules?

Blind Assignment for Blockchain Extension (BABE) is a block production engine that was inspired by Ouroboros Praos, another proof-of-stake protocol. It can be used on its own because it provides probabilistic finality, or it can be coupled with a finality gadget like GRANDPA.

In the introduction to this series, I outlined that a consensus algorithm helps a network of computers answer three questions. GRANDPA addresses the second.

This series will be a discussion about security and consensus in Polkadot. In part 1, we will define some terms before getting into the details of how Polkadot creates and secures blocks.