This document provides an overview of an introductory course on Polkadot. It will take place over 9 months and cover topics like the technical overview of Polkadot, parachains, applications in society, and more. Events will be held weekly on Thursdays at 5:30pm GMT+1 and recorded. The course material will help educate people about Polkadot, a blockchain network that allows specialized blockchains called parachains to communicate and process transactions in parallel for improved scalability. Polkadot uses a relay chain and bridges to connect different chains together and achieve interoperability.
5. Core details
Lasts July to August
Weekly events at Thurs 5.30pm
All happening online
Recorded and uploaded along with slides thereafter
Course material shared alongside the events to learn more
6. Week Event
1 Intro to Blockchain
2 Intro to Polkadot
3 Technical Overview of Polkadot
4 Intro to Substrate
Schedule
Week Event
5 Parachains
6 Non-technical involvement in Polkadot
7 Product Demos
8 Applications in society
Held weekly on a Thursday at 5.30pm GMT+1
7. De-ambiguating bitcoin
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency.
It is literally a currency that uses cryptography in some neat way.
It uses a piece of technology called blockchain.
Blockchain is a way for lots of people to cryptographically agree
that something has happened, without needing to trust a
central party.
Cryptography is a method of protecting information and
communications through the use of codes, so that only those
for whom the information is intended can read and process it.
10. The result:
The system provides trust guarantees to
anyone using it (since nothing can be
computed without widespread agreement
of the nodes i.e. the consensus mechanism).
11. What is Polkadot?
A scalable blockchain made up of specialised
blockchains that communicate with each other.
21. Verifying
Validators of the Relay
Chain check the transaction
looks legitimate, before
sending to other validators,
where more than half need
to agree.
25. The result
Lots of specialised
blockchains all co-existing
together under the same
umbrella.
26. Bridges
Polkadot uses bridges to
connect to other
blockchains that are
non-parachains (btc, eth)
and it’s cousin network,
Kusama
27. Putting this together
Relay chains: coordinate consensus and transaction
delivery between chains.
Parachains: constituent blockchains which gather and
process transactions.
Bridges: links to other blockchains with their own
consensus.
32. Nominators and validators
As a nominator, you nominate
Validators.
Validators have to stake DOT and
are responsible for verifying
mosts of the transactions within
the Polkadot network
