What’s the JAM?

Polkadot “Join-Accumulate Machine” (JAM) is arguably the biggest ever upgrade to Polkadot and scheduled for 2025. Gavin Wood published the JAM Grey Paper exactly 10 years after he wrote the Ethereum Yellow Paper and we expect its implementation to be equally revolutionary. 

 

JAM is a highly technical in nature. In its simplest terms it can be described as a abstraction or generalisation layer, which allows the relay chain to run as one – of many – services on Polkadot. Other possible services go far beyond what it available on any other blockchains today.

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JAM puts Polkadot on the trajectory of Gavin’s vision as “the world’s supercomputer on which anything and everything can run”. People long enough in the space will remember that this was also the original vision of Ethereum before they changed course due to scaling constraints. With Polkadot JAM there is the possibility of it becoming reality.

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All the applications this decentralised supercomputer will enable are still difficult to imagine. We sometimes think of it as the “iPhone moment:. When Steve Jobs unveiled its first version, it was clearly impressive, yet no one knew back then that combining GPS, payments and messaging would enable services like Uber and Airbnb. 

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The advent of the JAM era is the key reasons why Harbour Industrial Capital decided to launch its second fund. We don’t yet know all the applications that will be built on JAM, but we know where to find them.