There is no shortage of crypto projects and coins/tokens out there.
Uniswap is an example of what is called a decentralized exchange and they have a special type of protocol or rule or technology which is used to let you exchange different cyrptocurrencies.
To get a bit more technical and to relate it to the big daddy of crypto Ethereum….the Uniswap protocol is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain and lets you swap any tokens of the ERC20 variety.
Uniswap is part of the cryptocurrency business called decentralized finance or DeFi and its tokens are called governance tokens and go by the name UNIs.
Remember that Bitcoin is one of the only coins that are actually coins and not tokens and as a result can be used to buy things on the street where they are accepted.
Also remember that coins must have their own blockchain while tokens will rely on someone elses blockchain.
So here is where companies and protocols like Uniswap and others with similar names like SushiSwap come in.
They basically allow you to exchange different cryptos for different reasons.
So again, Uniswap is a protocol and as if it wasn’t confusing enough this protocol has two types of smart contracts that sit on top of Ethereum and they are called the Factory contract and an Exchange contract.
Now Polkadot is a little of the same but more complex.
It has the infrastructure which allows other independent blockchains together into one network and provides them with security by using their feature called the PolkaDot relay chain.
DOT is the PolkaDot token which can be used for several things like providing governance and paying for things in the network and are staked for running the network.
A few odd sounding terms related to PolkaDot is that they maintain a test platform called Kusama and parachains and substrates which we won’t go into at this time.
Its a protocol…its a blockchain(sharded) and its a coin….it slices it dices…:)
Its called a blockchain interoperability protocol.
It somehow allows different blockchains to communicate with each other.
Its called a Polkadot to sort of make it easier to appreciate what it is.
You are supposed to visualize a bunch of dots around a central big dot and these separate dots are supposed to be networks of people that take care of thins, almost like miners.
(under construction Jan 10 2022)
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