By Michael Scott
The Joint Accumulate Machine (JAM) was announced in April this year and represents a major update to Polkadot since the blockchain became wholly operational in 2021. It will significantly change the Relay Chain, reinforcing all its autonomous parachains. The upgrade’s suggested technical aims and ideologies were drafted in the JAM Gray Paper, authored by Gavin Wood, a Polkadot creator.
Polkadot depends on decentralized leadership to decide the project’s future, and the suggested update was verified following a near-undisputed approval vote by DOT holders last month.
JAM Explained
JAM is Polkadot multi-chain network’s improvement that seeks to substitute its Relay Chain with a ‘more minimalistic, modular design.’ The Relay Chain is the Polkadot network’s primary chain, managing the parachains that process transactions on the network. It standardizes data and views transaction addresses to ensure all systems can comprehend it.
The Web3 Foundation, Polkadot’s founding organization, notes that JAM will allow Polkadot to ‘operate generic services’ that can process the outcome of execution on cores. Besides, JAM is going to be ‘permissionless,’ allowing people to develop services on it. This is a move from the present intricate and investment-burdened system in which developers must bid for their leases at auction, supported by their supporters.
Agile Coretime will substitute Polkadot’s auction system. This economically flexible model will permit Polkadot users to buy Coretime in bulk. After being purchased, Coretime can later be divided and sold into separate elements and resold on secondary markets, and this may enhance the efficacy of the computing power’s overall market.
According to Gavin Wood, JAM’s new approach could aid in addressing some of the problems concerning scaling that earlier blockchains have mostly encountered. This is because their communities grow past specific points in terms of users, size, and projects.
What is Running JAM?
Also referred to as Polkadot Virtual Machine (PVM), the JAM supercomputer will utilize RISC-V. This open-sourced and broadly embraced processor architecture is utilized to create custom processors for various applications. It is utilized by companies such as Nvidia, Alibaba, and Google.
The mainframe will be offered a test run on ‘Polkadot Palace,’ a specially developed supercomputer comprising 16 TB of RAM and 12276 cores. It will also have the capability to host the complete JAM network. In case of successful implementation, JAM must attain data availability of up to 852MB/s. Further, the Gray Paper reckons that once JAM becomes fully operational, it will attain a processing capacity of approximately 150 billion gas per second.
Understanding How JAM will Impact the Polkadot Ecosystem
Similar to the present Relay Chain, the JAM chain will have nearly no functionality. Instead, functions such as staking and governance will be developed on these services, and JAM will offer the underlying interoperability that enhances operability and integration.
JAM’s Launch
There is a likelihood that JAM’s production-ready version will take between 20 to 60 months prior to deployment. Different from earlier updates to Polkadot, JAM will not be unveiled through a steady iterative strategy. The migration is going to occur all at once.
The real shift will not mean anything for persons passively holding DOT tokens or seeking to trade them.
Present Parachains’ Fate
Despite a considerable change to the Polkadot network, JAM is not a hard fork. This means that the functionality of parachains running on Polkadot will not be affected. A section of the JAM proposal incorporates a guarantee surrounding hard-coded compatibility.
The present parachains will continue functioning as normal. However, they will not be alone since they will end up being one of the several products that can be managed by the JAM chain.
How to Involve Developers?
The Web3 foundation will motivate developers seeking to implement the JAM protocol. The JAM Implementer’s Prize provides up to 10 Million DOT (nearly $70M at present prices) to developers able to meet explicit performance test criteria.
The price plans to award teams that fruitfully work on assorted implementations, for instance, utilizing alternative programming languages to Solidity.