Skip to content
Polkadot Handbook

Polkadot Technology

Plaza

Plaza

Plaza is the codename for the effort to add smart contracts to Asset Hub and turn it into a hub for liquidity and user activity on Polkadot. It will be a user-facing L1 for Polkadot.

Concretely, the proposal is to consolidate all the following features into a single system parachain, to be evolved from AssetHub and brought up to the maximum possible scale:

  • Asset Issuance [Currently on AssetHub]
  • Smart Contracts (Rust and EVM via RISC-V/PolkaVM) [Proposed in https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/885]
  • Staking [Currently on the Relay Chain]
  • Bridging Pallets [Currently on the BridgeHub parachain]
  • Near-zero fees (until scaling limits are reached)
  • I refer to this chain with the codename “Plaza” from here on out.

- Rob Habermeier, Polkadot co-founder

Introducing Plaza Rob Habermeier's blog post introducing the Plaza concept

PolkaVM

PolkaVM is currently in development to provide a more performant virtual machine to replace wasm.