Early access

Polkadot is one of the top cryptocurreny projects by market cap and was founded by Dr. Gavin Wood (previous co-founder and CTO of Ethereum), Robert Habermeier, and Peter Czaban.  

The cryoto universe is still young and very siloed (much like the internet was in its very early days) and it needs to transition into a truly interoperability state to unleash its full power and potential.  For crypto to become truly mainstream, everything needs to become much easier for the consumer in the future and Polkadot aims to accomplish this goal. 

Polkadot is working to create true interoperability.  Polkadot enables cross-blockchain transfers of any type of data or asset, not just tokens. Connecting to Polkadot gives you the ability to interoperate with a wide variety of blockchains in the Polkadot network.  

Key Polkadot features include:

1. True interoperability
2. Economic & transactional scalability
3. Easy blockchain innovation
4. High energy efficiency
5. Security for everyone
6. User-driven network governance

Learn more about Polkadot at https://polkadot.network/.

The Polkadot ecosystem is large and growing fast.  As stated in the answer above, Polkadot provides true interoperability, economic & transactional scalability, easy blockchain innovation, forkless and future proof, security for everyone, and a user-driven network governance.  With these tremendous advantages, numerous projects and teams want to build and launch their projects in the Polkadot ecosystem.  

In order to launch on Polkadot, a project must first win a parachain auction slot.  

Parachain auctions are auctions that are held on the Polkadot relay chain to determine which blockchain will connect to the parachain slot. Once the auction begins, then every project on the network is free to submit their bid to the relay chain.  In addition to the project's bid, individuals can also contribute to their favorite projects via the crowdloan (discussed below) to help a project win the auction slot.  

Typically each auction is for 7 days. The first 2+ days are a warm up period to allow contributors to contribute before the actual auction begins.  They use a candlestick auction and the winning block is randomly selected at any point from day 3 to day 7 and the one with the most DOT contributed on that block date/time is the winner but the winner is not revealed until after the auction ends.

The  very first auction slot became available and was won by Acala in November 2021.  Numerous new projects are lined up and bidding on auction slots which creates a great opportunity for individual DOT holders.  

In traditional financial markets, non-accredited individual investor virtually never have an opportunity to invest in a project pre-IPO where the major gains are often made.  Then on the day of the IPO, it often shoots way up in price before an individual can even have a buy order executed.  Understanding this frustration is what makes the Polkadot crowdloan process exciting.  Individual investors contributing to the crowdloans typically get a certain number of the new project tokens just for contributing and locking up their DOT to the project so you become a project owner before it new token hits the crypto exchanges. 

How does it work:

1. In addition to projects putting in their own DOT contributions,  they also offer Crowdloans which allows a project team to crowdsource DOT (for Polkadot slots) or KSM (for Kusama slots) to use to bootstrap its parachain auction to help them win an auction slot.  
2. The Сrowdloan allows people to contribute by agreeing to lock up their own DOT (KSM) until the end of the lease (up to 96 weeks).  
3. Project Teams can reward their contributors however they see fit.  Each project outlines their offering in advance of the auction and each project has the freedom to structure their own offering.  In addition to a base token offering per DOT contributed, many offer additional early bird and referral bonuses to help increase their changes to win an auction slot.    
4. IMPORTANT - You are not paying to get the crowdloan project tokens. Instead you are only locking up your DOT for the lease cycle and once the lease end your DOT is released and returned to you.  So if you are a long term believer and holder of Polkadot, this crowdloan option is a way for you to get into many new projects without having to pay for the new project tokens.

The https://parachains.info/ is a great website to learn about each project.  As you scroll down the page, click on Polkadot and you will see the auction slots.  Clicking on Auctions #1-5 as an example will show you past projects that won slots.  Select the newest Auctions and you will see a list of projects below.  Fore each project you can select the down arrow to the left of each project logo to get more details about each project.  This page also shows which projects are leading in the auction.  When you scroll further down the page, you will see a countdown clock to show if a current auction is in progress and roughly how much time you have left to contribute before the auction ends.

Once you do your research and select your projects, come back to your Polkadot rewards page to get your referral code to get extra bonus for contributing.

Each project offers a base token quantity for each DOT contributed to their project.  Many projects provide an additional referral incentive to encourage people to talk about and refer their projects to people in their network.  These projects typically provide an equal additional incentive to both the one who provides the referral and the one that receives the referral (e.g. ref bonus split 5% to referrer & 5% to referred). Again, this is a way to get additional FREE tokens.