Polkadot's founder, Gavin Wood, has released the Gray Paper detailing the upcoming Join-Accumulate Machine (JAM) upgrade for the network.

Wood revealed the news during his talk on Polkadot’s future at the Token2049 crypto conference in Dubai.

**Polkadot's Future**

Wood describes JAM as a revolutionary protocol that integrates aspects of both Polkadot and Ethereum. In a post on X, Polkadot emphasized that the introduction of JAM, a decade after the Yellow Paper, marks a significant step forward. It aims to replace Polkadot’s current Relay Chain with a more modular, minimalist design.

"Earlier today, @gavofyork presented the JAM Gray Paper. JAM combines features from Polkadot and Ethereum. It may eventually replace the Relay Chain with a more streamlined design.”

Web3 Foundation, the organization behind Polkadot, also revealed a 10 million DOT prize pool to encourage diversity in JAM's development.

"The JAM Implementer’s Prize is meant to fund and support projects that contribute to the early development of JAM implementations."

**A Decentralized Hybrid System**

JAM represents a decentralized hybrid system designed to provide secure, scalable smart contract functionality by merging Ethereum features into Polkadot's architecture.

“JAM is a protocol merging elements of Polkadot and Ethereum. It could replace the Relay Chain with a more modular, minimalist design.”

Web3 Foundation added that JAM would allow Polkadot to manage generic smart contract logic and execution on its cores, while also running on existing Substrate-based parachains. Developers can still use Substrate to create and deploy blockchains. JAM establishes a global permissionless object environment like Ethereum’s smart contract ecosystem, and secure parallel computation over a scalable node network. A proponent of the upgrade stated that JAM will enable Polkadot to become a true multi-core world computer, capable of supporting any app or service without encountering scalability, efficiency, or security challenges.

“[Polkadot] is already a multi-core processor, but limited to parachains. The plan is to further generalize this, allowing for more flexible deployment options. This will turn all parachains, or rollups, into an application layer service and transform Polkadot into a cloud service infrastructure.”

The upgrade will continue to use Polkadot's DOT token. Following the announcement, DOT saw an improvement in its declining trend, rising by about 3%.