{"document_id":"BLC-STUDY-0026","slug":"polkadot","title":"Polkadot: Vision for a heterogeneous multi-chain framework","authors":"Gavin Wood","year":2016,"date_label":"2016","publisher":"Gavin Wood","paper_type":"Design paper","category":"Interoperability","topics":["Interoperability"],"source_url":"https://github.com/w3f/polkadot-white-paper","source_label":"Web3 Foundation white paper","legacy_pdf_path":null,"sha256":null,"sha256_note":"No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.","version":"Source cited by the 2016 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.","doi":null,"rights_status":"Official external source only","source_status":"Official source","use_status":"Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.","licence":null,"licence_label":"No licence recorded. Rights status under review.","full_text":null,"full_text_reason":"Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.","editorial_line":"Wood's 2016 vision paper: a relay chain that provides shared security and a queue of cross-chain messages, with parachains that keep their own state transition. It is a vision paper. The live protocol has a specification of its own.","canonical_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/polkadot","record_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/polkadot","study_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/polkadot","last_reviewed":"2026-10-01","last_checked":"2026-10-01","relationships":[{"rel":"Canonical reading","label":"Polkadot study","href":"/whitepaper/polkadot"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Cosmos","href":"/whitepaper/cosmos"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"NEAR","href":"/whitepaper/near"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Kadena","href":"/whitepaper/chainweb"}]}