The Polkadot project released a detailed roadmap on Monday for the highly anticipated rollout of parachains and slot auctions, which should mark the full launch of the protocol.
The roadmap is divided into three main stages. The current phase is the Rococo testnet environment, where developers can test mechanisms to communicate between various Polkadot parachains, its analog of shards. The platform uses a mechanism called Cross-Chain Message Passing-lite, or XCMP-lite, to allow parachains to send tokens and generalized messages to each other by going through Polkadot’s relay chain, the central coordinator of the network.