Major Polkadot Upgrade Today

After passing community vote, Polkadot v0.9.19 is now enacted. This is a HUGE upgrade because it enacts Polkadot's new capability of XCM (the Cross-Consensus Message Format).

Essentially, XCM will allow cross-chain communication and teleporting of assets in the Polkadot eco-system.

Put simply, this is a breakthrough in interoperability.

As stated by Polkadot's Dr. Gavin Wood:

XCM aims to be a language communicating ideas between consensus systems. It should be general enough for it to be properly useful throughout a growing ecosystem. It should be extensible. Since the extensibility will inevitably imply change, it should also be future-proof and forwards-compatible. Finally, it should be efficient enough to run on-chain, and possibly in a metered environment.

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Some blockchains manage multiple assets, e.g. Ethereum’s ERC-20 framework allows for many different assets to be managed on-chain. Some manage assets which are not fungible such as Ethereum’s ETH but rather are non-fungible — one-of-a-kind instances; Crypto-kitties was an early example of such non-fungible tokens or NFTs.

XCM is designed to be able to handle all such assets without breaking a sweat.

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For chains that trust each other (such a homogeneous shards under the same overall consensus and security umbrella), we can use a framework that Polkadot calls teleporting, which basically just means destroying an asset on the sending side and minting it on the receiving side.

More details here.