Summary

This proposal aims to define Polkadot 2.0 as being scoped around the themes of Coretime.

If accepted, the first Polkadot runtime version that fully supports Agile Coretime, Async Backing, and Elastic Scaling will be the version considered Polkadot 2.0

Motivation

Giving versions to software products primarily acts as an attention coordination mechanism. Major versions are typically assigned for significant improvements in the feature set of software (or significant breaking changes).

After the delivery of Polkadot 2.0, attention in the developer and user community shifted towards what the next big evolutionary steps of Polkadot are going to be. Agile Coretime, as most notably publicly introduced by Gavin Wood at Decoded 2023, was the first major focal point of public attention and quickly became referred to by many as Polkadot 2.0.

The only other major theme next to Coretime-related development effort is JAM, which is still in research and with a yet unclear delivery timeline. It is more suitable for a future major version.

It is the opinion of the stakeholders voting AYE on this proposal that Coretime is a significant evolution in the efficient allocation of Polkadot blockspace and should be marked as Polkadot 2.0.

Specifically, we consider 3 epic features to be part of this development track:

• Agile Coretime, which is the ability to acquire bulk and on-demand coretime and dynamically allocate it to parachains
• Async Backing, which allows parachains to submit parablocks for inclusion into the Polkadot relay chain more flexibly
• Elastic Scaling, which will allow parachains to consume more than one core if they need additional resources

Instructions

If accepted, this proposal instructs the Polkadot Technical Fellowship and any other actor that respects this proposal to declare the first Polkadot runtime version that supports all of the three described features as Polkadot 2.0.

Since the exact definition of the circumstances and implementation of those features is complex, subject to change, and intersubjective, it is up to the Technical Fellowship to apply its best judgment on what constitutes the delivery of the features.