Polkadot has announced the introduction of its analytical tool, Polkawatch, to measure how effectively the platform is decentralized. This is based on the belief that the extent of the decentralization of a platform is determined by its most centralized component.

In a blog post made by the Polkadot team, it highlighted that the tool is designed to monitor how well the validation process is decentralized on the Polkadot network.

Supported By Web3 Foundation

The update stated that it has the support of the Web3 Foundation, the Switzerland-based organization founded by former Ethereum CTO and co-founder, Gavin Woods.

The Polkadot blog post states:

It uses the Reward event as the main measure of Computing Effort and it complements the information with networking information (IP address) of validator nodes which is then crossed with external geolocation data sources.

The platform enables the navigation of rewards, validation processes, location, the computing network operators and nodes. It helps Polkadot to assess how decentralized the blockchain is and its potentials at decentralizing even more. It also gives insight into the rewards produced by the system with view to knowing how well these contribute to decentralization of the Polkadot network.

The idea is to ensure that the blockchain does not get too decentralized due to its attendant risks, such as 51% attacks and random deplatforming as is obtainable in centralized systems.

Today we are introducing @polkawatch , decentralization analytics for @Polkadot https://t.co/IV2w8ECBUH

— Polkawatch (@polkawatch) June 23, 2022

“Regulatory related risks by watching the amount of rewards generated from different countries. Absence of due-process risks can be mitigated by not letting any operator become too big, too critical for the operation, etc.” the post says.

You can read more about Polkawatch here.