Polkadot came into the market as an ethereum killer. However over the years it made it's own wonderland and got lost in it. It has plenty of features which are totally different from ethereum. And they managed to create parachain concept which turned out to be worth exploring for variety of use case that made sense in some industry cases.
Polkadot's parachains and the chain auctions was thing of the past. Now that the chain has been upgraded to 2.0 and over the years those upgrades would be ending up making some changes that would take chain into the phase of being competitive like ethereum. So they have one such update named JAM.
Let's take a look at this Jama protocol update and how it makes sense for Polkadot.
JAM stands for the Join-Accumulate Machine (JAM). This is a VM implementation in the chain where the polkadot shares the features like ethereum. Like smart contract and other VM features for the compatibility. So it offers the secure and safe smart contract feature in the polkadot chain. Here the relay chain of the polkadot is being replaced and upgraded to more minimalist level of design for the chain.
This change of the new upgrade is going to offer the polkadot much needed revamp. And at some point the relay chain would halt and the new migration is likely to happen as well. This would not happen in one go but over a period of time as the migration happens within the chain. The update was originally known as the corejam but now changed to Jam. You can read about that proposal in the Polkadot's site here.
When the JAM proposal was pushed it was called as corejam and you can find this on the page of github too. So this proposal was the one that give rise to the JAM protocol. And this protocol has some of the features which would make the relay chain overhaul and complete change of the chain to the new JAM. This update is designed for the efficiency and scalability of the chain.
You can check out the gray paper pdf for to know about the JAM protocols VM that has the features of the polkadot and the ethereum. The protocol would go for an update of ratification of the chain and then confirming to the performance test and the update it would be going on another iteration. It'd also check the compatibility of the services through the chain upgrade before halting the relay chain. So a lot of interesting feature to be released in phases.
Polkadot is trying to innovate and trying to be in competition with the ethereum. It may not be instant for them to adapt to changes in the market and trying to take on a beast. However in past their parachain concept worked and now they are going through the minimal model. In near future the Jam upgrade would work in phases and make the protocol usable.
I feel ethereum has created a standard to which many chains have found it harder to keep up. And also updating the chains have become even more harder. On that note I would say that Jam protocol should atleast push the polkadot to a place where they can innovate more easily rather than slowing themselves with parachains and relay chain. So this update is going to be crucial for their growth.
Polkadot's 2.0 update has introduced the JAM protocol and it has shown some promise over the relay chain. And it would surely change some of the variables of the chain in order to be feature compatible with ethereum using their VM.
