How to Buy Polkadot (DOT)

Thinking about investing in Polkadot (DOT)? Find a comprehensive guide on Polkadot (DOT), how it ranks in the cryptocurrency world, and whether or not it's a sound investment.

How to Buy DOT

1. Create a Coinbase account - We recommend using Coinbase as it offers $5 in free Bitcoin when you sign-up.
2. Add a payment method - Add your payment method and fund your account.
3. Research the coin - Search for the coin by name or ticker symbol - DOT.
4. Decide the amount of coins - Now it is time to decide how many coins you want to buy of Polkadot.
5. Purchase coins of DOT - Buy the amount of coins you want with at the current price on Coinbase.

Polkadot is a multi-chain network that serves as a bridge between different, separate blockchains in the crypto sphere and connects them.

If you’re curious about how Pokadot works or if you want to decide if investing in Polkadot is worth it, keep reading. We will explain all you need to know about this platform.

What is Polkadot (DOT)?

All of these blockchains have no built-in way to communicate with each other.  You can’t automatically swap ETH for BNB (Binance Token) unless you go through an intermediary.

Usually, that is a crypto exchange or trading platform. If you send ETH to a BNB wallet address, you will lose your ETH.  Polkadot aims to change all that by setting up a central relay chain and parachains that can communicate via the relay chain.

In addition, it tries to set up bridges between different established blockchains, such as the BTC and ETH chains, so they can communicate with each other.

In this way, smart contracts on one chain can trigger actions on another chain.  In addition to parachains, there are parathreads. Those are pay-as-you-go parachains that secure their places on the network for only as long as needed.

The bridges will connect both parachains and parathreads and external, established blockchains like the Ethereum chain.  However, Polkadot goes beyond that and allows you to send data, not just tokens, across networks.

In other words, its goal is to make cross-blockchain registries and computation possible across both public and private blockchains.  In Polkadot’s example, a school with a private blockchain would be able to send proof to a public degree-verification blockchain.

Any app would be able to pull data from a public or private blockchain and send it to be used in another blockchain.

Who Are the Founders of Polkadot?

The founder of the Polkadot protocol is Gavin Wood, who also was the co-founder of Ethereum. It is currently a joint project under development by Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies - but Gavin Wood founded both.

Gavin Wood’s vision was to unite the crypto world so that instead of needing to rely on third-party exchanges and bridges made by those exchanges to conduct inter-blockchain transactions, everything could be done seamlessly through the multi-chain Polkadot ecosystem. 

While that is Ethereum's goal as well, Ethereum is nowhere close to reaching that goal. Ethereum 2.0 has been planned for years, but its developers keep pushing it off, as they are never ready. Gavin decided to make his project as an alternative instead. 

The first token sale of Polkadot took place in October 2017.

Polkadot (DOT) Price Today

How Much Polkadot is in Circulation?

There are approximately 1 billion DOT in circulation. Initially, the circulating supply was only 10 million, but that was changed later on through a re-denomination that changed the balances of everyone’s wallets and the overall supply to make calculating Polkadot easier.

How is the Polkadot Network Secured?

Polkadot uses various methods to secure its network. Here are some ways it keeps it secure: 

• Validators: Validators work in consensus with other validators to produce relay chain blocks, verify information in parachain blocks, and secure the chain and state transitions by staking dots and validating proofs from collators. 
• Collators: These collect shard transactions from users. They create unsealed blocks for the validators to verify and transmit on the relay chain. Collators can also monitor the network and report bad behavior to validators. 
• Nominators: These help keep the relay chain secure by selecting trustworthy validators. 

A parachain may also provide its security, but it is not needed.  Overall, Polkadot is pretty secure. 

What Makes Polkadot Unique?

Polkadot is unique because it is the first project of its kind that has shown considerable progress. Ethereum 2.0, for example, has been planned for years, but it keeps getting pushed off by the developers, and many people don’t think it will come out for years to come.

Gavin Wood created Polkadot to be everything Ethereum was supposed to be.  Ultimately, Polkadot will have a transaction capability of 1 million transactions per second, allowing it to truly power a digital cryptocurrency ecosystem across the world.

Compare that to Bitcoin, for example, which can only handle around seven transactions per second. That’s why Bitcoin can be slow at times and not a good solution for replacing fiat currency with cryptocurrency. 

Even Visa can only handle 24,000 transactions per second (in practice, it handles around 1,700 transactions per second). 

Cardano also has similar goals to Polkadot, but works differently (even though both are proof-of-stake ecosystems), and it doesn’t have as much to show as Polkadot.

There are hundreds of projects on Polkadot, including around a dozen or two Dapps; Cardano can not say the same for itself.  Both are good investments and in the top cryptocurrencies in the world.

However, Gavin Wood has a lot more credentials than the founder of Cardano, even though both are not in control of their projects anymore. 

Polkadot Alternatives

Should I Invest in Polkadot?

So, is Polkadot a good investment? Polkadot might be a great coin to HODL for a while, as it has a great vision and has proven to be able to reach its goals.

While Polkadot still has a long way to go in improving its ecosystem, and some additional security measures could be implemented to make it more secure, it has come a lot further than any other project with similar goals. 

While Ethereum 2.0 is believed to change the crypto sphere once it does come out, many people have given up hope for it, as its release date just gets pushed off every time.

And while Cardano has lofty goals, it has been slower than Polkadot in releasing important features such as smart contract functionality, while Polkadot has a lot more to show for itself. 

While this does not constitute investment advice, and you are always taking a risk while investing, we think Polkadot has a promising future ahead and is heading on the right path according to its founder’s visions.

Buy yourself a bag and store it for a while, but keep diversifying your portfolio and investing in other projects as well.