XCM is coming to Polkadot with runtime v0.9.19. What does this mean, and what will it entail?
First off, Polkadot implements Substrate's "forkless upgrades" protocol. This means that the business logic of the chain (what a block or transaction actually does) can be updated by governance. Polkadot's already upgraded dozens of times. Iterate fast, without breaking things.
So once the code has been released to enable XCM in the runtime in version 0.9.19, it still needs to move through Polkadot's governance before the upgrade will be applied. This should take a few weeks, depending on whether the technical committee chooses to accelerate the upgrade
There's a distinction between XCMP and XCM. XCMP is dumb transport, and XCM is messages with meaningful content. XCMP channels are data transfer channels between chains, and they just handle raw streams of bytes. XCM is a protocol and message format for cross-chain transacting.
Channels are fully safe, secure bridges between parachains. Unlike other bridging protocols, which introduce a 'weakest-link' problem, messages across XCMP channels are secured at the same level as the relay chain. Mr. Vitalik describes it well:
Parachains open channels to other parachains by sending an XCM message to the relay-chain instructing it to open the channel (and inform the remote chain of the request). Since the relay-chain hasn't had XCM processing enabled, no channels have been opened until now.
XCM support for Polkadot was enabled in PR github.com , but it's been on Kusama much longer. After being battle-tested among Kusama's chaotic community, it's proven ready to deploy to the Polkadot network.
What we've seen on Kusama so far is that the system is gathering a lot of momentum. Channels are cheap, so we're trending towards every parachain having a channel to every other parachain. This can't be done effectively in the bridges paradigm without compromising on security.
So what does this mean for the trends within the developer community on Polkadot?
Historically, the focus in the Polkadot community has been on building parachains and smart contracts directly. But the product design has mostly been done in isolation, and there'll be a lot to learn from this new, asynchronously composable landscape.
Another factor is market participation: the thing that's slowly blowing everyone's minds in the blockchain space is asynchrony. Arbitrage bots, MEV, and "international trade" between blockchains are going to be altered forever by the impending asynchronous paradigm.
There's going to be a combinatorial explosion in both the amount and kinds of opportunities in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems. This is really what XCM unlocks: cross-chain value. Further down the line, this'll teach the next generation of devs what chains & products to build
With the enabling of XCM, the future of Polkadot enters into the hands of the community. We'll keep chugging away at the core protocol, making it faster, safer, better. But this signals a new era for the protocol, where the ecosystem itself can become an evolving organism.
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