Agile Coretime

In Polkadot 1.0, the only way for a parachain to be secured by Polkadot was to rent a lease through an auction, which guaranteed parachain block validation for up-to two years. This involved locking significant amount of DOT, leading to a high barrier of entry for small and medium scale blockchain projects. The parachains produced blocks at a regular interval of 12 seconds, irrespective of the network activity. This led to inefficient resource allocation and misplaced economic incentives while producing almost empty blocks under lighter traffic and being unable to accommodate heavier traffic when it exceeded block limits. Agile Coretime resolves all of these drawbacks.

The figure below shows the core usage for Polkadot 1.0, where the horizontal axis is time, and each row represents a core. Colors show different parachains, each using one core (i.e., one parachain, one core).

Agile Coretime allows for the purchase of coretime in “bulk” with an allocation for one month. Heavy duty parachains which need to author a block every 12 seconds (or every 6s through Asynchronous Backing), can seamlessly “renew” the core each month. Coretime renewal orders take precedence over new orders and provide protection against price fluctuations, allowing parachains to plan their project budget and costs more effectively.

The purchased coretime can also be split up and sold in parts, down to a single block per month, allowing for secondary markets to thrive and improve the allocation efficiency of coretime. Furthermore, Agile Coretime offers on-demand coretime functionality that enables the authoring of a parachain block on-demand.