Polkadot’s asynchronous backing goes live on Astar Shibuya testnet

Astar Network’s Shibuya testnet has just launched a major update with the introduction of asynchronous backing, one of the three key technological advancements driving Polkadot toward its 2.0 version.

With asynchronous backing, Polkadot is slashing block time from 12 seconds to just 6 seconds. The network also bumped up the maximum block weight from 0.5 seconds to 2 seconds, allowing a much larger volume of transactions to be processed in the same amount of time — a big win for developers building decentralized apps on Astar.

Shibuya is the Astar Network's parachain testnet with EVM capabilities, closely resembling the Shiden and Astar mainnets. It has nearly identical chain specifications, making it an ideal testing environment for developers planning to launch their dApps on the mainnet.

Astar Network is a parachain of the Polkadot network that supports the development of dApps using both EVM and WASM smart contracts and offers cross-chain communication via cross-consensus messaging (XCM). This flexibility helps dApps interact with multiple blockchains, making the network more versatile.

The asynchronous backing also comes with the ability to reuse failed parachain blocks, which cuts down on wasted resources and makes the network more efficient overall. 

In terms of impact, asynchronous backing translates to faster transaction processing and better throughput, boosting the network’s capacity from 100,000 to a million transactions per second. This allows Polkadot to handle a lot more traffic without hiccups, which is crucial for supporting larger and more complex dApps.

The upgrade also promises increases in blockspace production time and transaction volume per block, claiming to deliver eight times the throughput while keeping the network secure. 

Despite the technical leap, DOT’s price showed a muted reaction to the news. The token rose slightly by 1.16% in the past 24 hours, settling at around $4.23. 

Polkadot recently released the Join-Accumulate Machine (JAM) Gray Paper, a development combining elements of both Polkadot and Ethereum .

Source: Investing.com