Polkadot
About Polkadot
The price of Polkadot (DOT) is $4.23 today, as of Sep 16 08:22 p.m., with a 24-hour trading volume of $144.68M. Over the last 24 hours, the price has decreased by -5.45%. Polkadot currently has a circulating supply of 1.41B and a market cap of $5.96B.
DOT is the native cryptocurrency of Polkadot; a blockchain interoperability protocol founded in 2016. It is a sharded blockchain, meaning it connects several different chains together in a single network, allowing them to process transactions in parallel and exchange data between chains without sacrificing security.
Launched in October 2017, Polkadot released 10 million dot tokens into circulation via an initial coin offering (ICO) raising 485,331 ether worth (approximately $145 million at the time.)
The tokens in the current supply are allocated as follows:
- 58.4% of the tokens are held by investors, including 50% issued in the original token sale, followed by a sale of 5% of the total supply in 2019 and another sale the following year representing 3.4% of the total supply.
- The Web 3 Foundation, the Swiss organization that runs the network, owns 11.6% of the tokens.
- 30% is held by founders and the foundation.
The dot token serves three key functions in Polkadot:
- To be used for governance of the network.
- To be staked for the operation of the network.
- To be “bonded” to connect a new blockchain – called a “parachain” – to Polkadot.
An interesting feature of Polkadot is that it has no hard limit on its total supply. Instead, new dot tokens are constantly released into circulation, at a predetermined, annual inflation rate of 10 percent.
DOT’s price reached a peak of $6.30 shortly after it launched in May 2020, then wavered between $4 and $5 for the remainder of 2020. In May 2021, DOT’s price hit an all-time high of $49.80. During the Q4 bull run of 2021, DOT’s price hit another peak of $44.41 in October.