Earlier this fall, Cardano and Solana were lapping up the attention, as the two "Ethereum killers" battled for spots on the cryptocurrency leaderboard. Now, Polkadot's DOT coin is throwing elbows to get to the front.
The price of DOT rose 25% over 24 hours—part of a 36% gain over the last week—to zoom past $42 today. That's the most expensive the asset has been since May, when it reached an all-time high of $49.35, according to CoinGecko. As of publication, the price sits at $41.50.
It's probably not a coincidence that, after five years of development from Parity Technologies (the engineering team behind Polkadot), the project announced yesterday it was ready to launch what it calls "parachains." The Polkadot leadership group subsequently voted to begin auctions for parachain slots starting November 11.
Parachains are their own blockchains that run alongside the main network, using it for security and to validate transactions. Polkadot, then, is all about blockchain interoperability, with an eye toward increasing the number of transactions a network can process.