First published 22 August 2020, the day after DOT was redenominated. Expanded in October 2026 for coretime, the shorter nominator unbonding, and the JAM plan. Polkadot is a network designed so many blockchains can share one security system instead of each recruiting its own miners or validators from scratch. The shared piece is the relay chain. The connected chains are parachains. DOT is the native asset. You use it to nominate validators, to take part in governance, and to pay for the compute time those parachains consume. It is not a second ether, and it is not a coin you receive because you held bitcoin.
The useful confusions are the unit, the lockup, and the canary network. Get those three wrong and a balance, a staking screen, or a deposit address will lie to you politely.
Where it came from
Gavin Wood, who had helped build Ethereum, published the Polkadot white paper in 2016. Two organisations sit beside the protocol: the Web3 Foundation, which funded the work, and Parity Technologies, which built much of the software. A 2017 token sale ran into US securities questions, and the foundation offered some buyers their money back. That sale is not the chain. The relay chain produced blocks in May 2020. Transfers of DOT were enabled later that summer.
On 21 August 2020 the network redenominated DOT. One old DOT became 100 new DOT. The base units on the ledger did not multiply. The label people call “one DOT” got smaller, a hundred times, so a balance displayed a hundred times larger. A chart, a memory, or a forum post from before that day is talking about a different unit. If someone says they bought DOT at a price that only makes sense before August 2020, ask which DOT.
How agreement works
Polkadot uses nominated proof of stake. Validators produce blocks. Nominators back a set of validators with DOT. The protocol assigns stake so that the active validators end up with a similar pile behind them, rather than letting one giant pile take every reward. Rewards are new DOT. There is no 21 million cap. Issuance is a parameter, not a birthday.
For years, nominating meant a 28-day wait to get the DOT back, and nominators could be slashed if a validator they backed misbehaved. On 6 July 2026 a governance vote, referendum 1910, changed the nominator side. Nominators are no longer slashable. Unbonding for them is about two eras, roughly two days, instead of 28. Validators still put up their own stake, can still be slashed, and still wait longer to exit. If you started unbonding before that vote, the old 28-day clock kept running on that request. A screenshot of “two days” from a blog is not a promise about a lock you already opened. Read the staking screen. Staking is a lock and a queue, not a savings account is the category. This paragraph is the Polkadot-shaped version, as of that July vote, and governance can change the numbers again.
Parachains, coretime, and Kusama
A parachain is its own chain that borrows the relay chain’s validator set for security. Early on, projects leased a slot by winning an auction, often with DOT that holders lent them for the lease. That was a crowdloan: you locked DOT to help a project, and you were supposed to get it back at the end, not a dividend. Agile coretime is the later design. Projects buy compute time, including a monthly bulk allocation, instead of a multi-year auction. Renewal is favoured over a newcomer’s bid, so a chain that already runs can keep its slot without a fresh war. A crowdloan you joined in 2021 and a coretime bill in 2026 are different products. Do not treat the word parachain as a single button.
Kusama is the canary network: a looser, faster chain where ideas are tried with KSM, not DOT. An application that exists on Kusama does not exist on Polkadot until someone deploys it there. A Kusama address will not receive DOT. The tickers are the warning. People still paste the wrong one.
What is still a plan
JAM, the Join-Accumulate Machine, is the project’s plan for a successor to the relay chain. In September 2026 the developers published a migration split into workstreams and did not set a mainnet date. Holding DOT does not become a new token because a roadmap says the relay chain will shrink. A proposal to rename the asset was rejected. Until software you actually run changes networks, your DOT is on Polkadot, under the rules above.
Before you send or nominate
Polkadot addresses are SS58 strings. On the main network they often start with 1. They are not Ethereum addresses and not Kusama addresses. An account below the existential deposit, the minimum the chain requires, can be reaped and disappear. The wallet should show the current minimum. Do not learn it from a two-year-old tutorial.
Nominating is a signature, not a deposit into a company, unless the app you are using is a company’s app. Then you have an IOU plus a yield line. If you cannot tell which, read how crypto wallets actually work before the amount matters. Nothing here is an instruction to buy, nominate, or unbond DOT.
