Polkadot Developers Welcome JAM as Parachain Shakeup Gets Underway

The crypto industry loves its buzzwords and isn’t prone to a spot of hyperbole either, which is why terms such as “game-changer” and “revolutionary” should be taken with a pinch of salt. Predictably, however, these are exactly the sort of phrases that have been used to describe Polkadot’s forthcoming JAM upgrade.

Even without resorting to such grand terms, it’s no exaggeration to say that JAM represents a radical overhaul of the way Polkadot works and that it’s gotten the developer community extremely excited. Polkadot has empirically operated independently of other blockchain ecosystems such as Ethereum, but JAM has the potential to bring it closer to the center of web3 while introducing major scalability improvements to boot.

Unpacking JAM’s Design

JAM isn’t just your regular blockchain upgrade, the sort that most crypto networks periodically undergo. It’s a wide-ranging and highly ambitious attempt to make Polkadot the world’s most scalable blockchain network – while simultaneously making it easier to build on. As the abstract to Dr Gavin Wood’s gray paper explains, “JAM provides a global singleton permissionless object environment—much like the smart-contract environment pioneered by Ethereum—paired with secure sideband computation parallelized over a scalable node network, a proposition pioneered by Polkadot.”

But what does this all mean exactly? Well in simple terms, JAM is an attempt to make Polkadot parachains less isolated by improving the ease with which data can flow through the conduit connecting them all – the relay chain. It supports parallel processing and elastic scalability, which will significantly increase throughput and computational capacity for one thing.

At the same time, JAM makes it easier to integrate two core blockchain components: smart contracts and ZK rollups. The applications for zero-knowledge technology are vast but in the context of Polkadot, they’ll be integrable as L2s that can support cheap transactions and greater privacy. Smart contracts will also be easier to build into Polkadot dapps, drawing data from a rich variety of sources.

Like Ethereum But Faster

As Dr Gavin Wood has acknowledged, some of the features JAM incorporates have been inspired by Ethereum, particularly in regards to more natural smart contract integration. But there’s one key feature that makes it very different from Ethereum’s architecture: JAM is designed to be massively scalable. It will support up to 341 cores simultaneously which will allow it to execute complex smart contracts and have capacity around 650x greater than Ethereum.

Impressive as these benchmarks are, a blockchain doesn’t run on tech alone. Which is why Polkadot has been on a year-long mission to onboard hundreds of new developers through a series of global hackathons, accelerators, and boot camps. The more devs it can tempt to enter its ecosystem, the greater the quality and quantity of dapps Polkadot users will be able to access.

While Polkadot devs will need to wait a little longer to put JAM’s capabilities to the test in a live setting, there’s plenty for them to do in the meantime, starting with the Decentralized JAM bounty program. A generous prize pool has been made available for devs willing to create JAM clients in a variety of programming languages to decentralize its protocol and provide flexible access options. Whatever terms you wish to describe JAM by, this much holds true: it’s much more than just a blockchain upgrade.