From today, DOT tokens operating on the Polkadot blockchain are transferable between accounts.
DOT tokens were sold with a lucky ICO conducted on Ethereum which raised $140 million at the end of 2017. The DOT Allocation Indicators distributed on the Ethereum blockchain could be transformed into Polkadot DOT long ago, but could not be transferred between accounts.
The Polkadot network, which went online at the end of May, will now allow transfers to the Polkadot mainnet from block 1’205’128, which should take place around 2:45 PM UTC today
Until now it was not possible to buy DOT on any platform because even the DOT Allocation Indicators issued on Ethereum were not transferable. The DOT tokens traded so far on the various exchanges were IOUs, basically an informal guarantee of the exchanges’ debt.
The authenticity of the IOUs traded on the various platforms is questionable, and it could also be that some exchanges do not actually have the DOT tokens they claim to have.
Some of the major exchange platforms include Huobi, OKex, Kraken and Coinbase. After officially supporting the “swap” of the ERC20 tokens originally distributed during the ICO, they now allow the trading of DOT tokens.
The renaming of the DOT
With the first real vote at the end of July on the Polkadot blockchain on the 27th, it was decided that the DOT tokens should be “stock split”, creating a new DOT of which one hundred units would be equivalent to the old original DOT.
The turnout was just under a third of the tokens, an important result that denotes the involvement of the Polkadot community, considering that both the Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies abstained from voting.
Polkadot aims to be a completely decentralized platform, with governance and decisions that depend entirely on the votes of token owners.
Of the four options for voting, 86% of voters chose a new DOT name which is defined as 10,000,000,000 Planck, Polkadot’s smallest unit like Bitcoin’s satoshi.
The main advantage according to the developers is that it avoids the use of too many decimal places by obtaining a simpler calculation system. Obviously, the value of the new DOT will be a penny higher than the old DOT.
To give the ecosystem time to prepare, the name change will take place about 72 hours after DOT transfers are enabled.
The “Denomination Day” party, as it was named by Polkadot, will then take place at block 1,248,328, which will take place no earlier than 4:40 PM UTC on Friday, August 21st, 2020.
DENOMINATION DAY: On August 21st at approximately 13:15 UTC (block number 1,248,328), DOT tokens will undergo a redenomination from the original sale. 𝘕𝘦𝘸 𝘋𝘖𝘛 will be 100x smaller than DOT (old). Therefore, your balance will be 100x higher and the price will be 100x lower. pic.twitter.com/sOvVLvcBtA
— Polkadot (@Polkadot) August 10, 2020
There are several DeFi projects on Polkadot that will benefit from the transferability of DOT and we will certainly talk about them in the future.
