Deutsche Telekom is betting big on the Polkadot blockchain platform

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Today we talk about the new developments in the Polkadot ecosystem, including reports on Deutsche Telekom’s digital innovation subsidiary, T-Systems Multimedia Solutions (MMS) investing in DOT tokens and planning to leverage its infrastructure to provide Polkadot with a secure ecosystem, and how Gear Technologies has raised $12 million in a Blockchange-led funding round.

Gear Technologies raised $12M to benefit the DOT ecosystem

Gear Technologies, a smart-contract layer supporting the Polkadot blockchain framework, has raised $12 million in a Blockchange-led funding round. Lemniscap, an investment firm specializing in investments in emerging crypto assets, the hedge fund management firm - Three Arrows Capital, and the asset management company - Distributed Global are among the other companies that took part in the funding round.

Gear's infrastructure efforts will benefit our entire ecosystem," according to Polkadot CEO Gavin Wood, who was there among the top executives of Parity Technologies and Web3 Foundation took part in the round.

The announcement is considered to be a major milestone for Polkadot. The network’s first parachains – basically, layer 1 blockchains running atop the layer 0 that is Polkadot – went live on Saturday.

Polkadot does not support contract development on its own because it is more of a meta-protocol than an application platform, according to Gear Technologies founder Nikolay Volf, who was previously a core developer at Parity and worked closely with Wood for six years.

In an interview, Volf stated, "The overarching goal is to provide a fast track for smart-contract development in the Polkadot ecosystem. Our approach to how multiple contracts interact with one other is a very parallelizable design in terms of technology." As indicated by Volf, Gear's next move is to launch a testnet in early 2020 and pass third-party security and financial audits.

"No single blockchain design works optimally for every use case. Each chain comes with trade-offs making it good for some applications and not others. The parachain model was created with the belief that the future of Web 3 will involve many different types of blockchains working together." - Gavin Wood

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Deutsche Telekom is betting big on Polkadot

Deutsche Telekom, one of the world's leading integrated telecommunications companies, is all set to participate in the public blockchain network Polkadot as a validator. Deutsche Telekom’s digital innovation subsidiary, T-Systems Multimedia Solutions (MMS) invests in DOT tokens and will leverage its infrastructure to provide Polkadot with a secure ecosystem.

Polkadot will be Deutsche Telekom's fourth blockchain project, but it is the first network T-Systems examined for running infrastructure, and it has been on the company's agenda since the start, according to Andreas Dittrich, head of Deutsche Telekom's Blockchain Solutions Center. According to Dittrich, T-Systems will run numerous public and private validators for the Polkadot network.

"As Deutsche Telekom, we have always supported the collaboration of people and companies, now also with decentralized technologies. Polkadot is a heterogeneous, multi-chain network allowing various blockchains of different characteristics to perform arbitrary, cross-chain communication under shared security. We fully believe in this future vision of a connected world. Like we did before with Celo, we are also investing in DOT tokens to be able to participate in the governance of the network, and basically put our money where our mouth is to support our infrastructure case," said Dittrich.

T-Systems may have had to wait a year or two for Polkadot to go up and running. As soon as the first round of parachain auctions ends, Polkadot is soon to open its doors to the first five application builders this week.

T-systems MMS will use the Open Telekom Cloud which meets the strict requirements for security and compliance in the European legal framework For the provision and secure operation of the infrastructure.

The current lack of interoperability among blockchains, which are effectively data silos, is one of the major issues Polkadot attempts to resolve. To do so, Polkadot’s relay chain, the central chain of Polkadot, organizes interactions across many parallel networks known as parachains. T-Systems MMS allows the secure and trustworthy transmission of messages between independent blockchains by participating in the Polkadot network as a validator.

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