Polkadot (DOT) Exchange

OpenGov Referendums #1710 and #1828 set a permanent hard supply cap of 2.1 billion DOT and cut annual issuance by 53.6%, from about 120 million DOT to about 56.88 million. Inflation fell to roughly 3.1%.

Issuance decreases by 13.14% of the remaining supply every two years, following a pi-based formula, with the first reduction on March 14, 2026.

80% of coretime sales revenue and a portion of transaction fees are burned. Because coretime is bought with DOT, ecosystem growth feeds directly into supply reduction.

It replaced the parachain auction system, where projects locked large amounts of DOT for two-year slots. Developers now buy compute on demand, similar to cloud pricing, which lowers the cost of getting started.

Completed in October 2025, it lets a parachain use multiple Relay Chain cores during traffic spikes. Together with Agile Coretime it turns Polkadot into a flexible computing platform.

A parachain is an independent, application-specific Layer 1 blockchain with its own tokens, governance, and execution logic. It connects to Polkadot's Relay Chain, which provides shared security and interoperability.

JAM (Join-Accumulate Machine) is a roadmap upgrade positioning Polkadot as a decentralized supercomputer, with RISC-V execution environments beyond WebAssembly. It is a roadmap item, not a live feature.

The network can update its own codebase autonomously and forklessly through on-chain governance, so upgrades pass by community vote. DOT holders vote on all network upgrades and treasury spending.

Vote in governance, stake to secure the Relay Chain (reward rates vary and are published on staking dashboards), and buy coretime for parachain operations. The 21Shares Polkadot Staking ETF (TDOT) offers regulated exposure.

DOT uses Substrate-based SS58 addresses, alphanumeric strings starting with 1. Never send it to an Ethereum 0x address or a Bitcoin address, since the funds may be lost. Deposits to centralized exchanges may also need a MEMO.

Open swapzone.io/exchange/polkadot, enter the amount, and compare offers from partner exchanges. Paste your SS58 address, send DOT to the deposit address (add a MEMO if shown), and track the order.

Polkadot is a Layer-0 multichain network created by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood and developed by Parity Technologies. DOT is its native token used for staking, governance, and bonding new parachains (specialized blockchains that connect to the Polkadot relay chain). Polkadot's core design allows independent blockchains (parachains) to share security and communicate with each other through the relay chain without needing their own validator sets. The relay chain itself does not support smart contracts; that functionality lives on parachains like Moonbeam or Acala. Maximum DOT supply is capped at 2.1 billion since the March 2026 tokenomics change, with approximately 1.71 billion DOT in circulation as of October 2026, according to CoinGecko.

DOT serves three functions on Polkadot. Governance: DOT holders vote on runtime upgrades, parachain slot auctions, and treasury spending. Staking: validators and nominators bond DOT to secure the relay chain and earn staking rewards. Bonding: projects bid DOT in parachain slot auctions to secure a slot on the relay chain for up to 96 weeks. DOT bonded in auctions is locked (not burned) and returned when the lease expires. This bonding demand is why crowdloans exist, where projects raise DOT from community members who lock their tokens for the project's auction bid.

Polkadot uses SS58-encoded addresses, which are Base58-encoded strings that typically begin with the number 1 for Polkadot mainnet addresses. These addresses are not compatible with Ethereum or Bitcoin wallets. Polkadot-native wallets include Polkadot.js extension, Talisman, SubWallet, and Nova Wallet. Hardware wallet support is available via Ledger's Polkadot app. Polkadot requires a minimum account balance (existential deposit, currently 1 DOT) to keep an address active; sending the full balance will delete the account.