Swap Polkadot (DOT)

The numbers below were read on 14 October 2026 from the Polkadot Wiki at wiki.polkadot.com and from polkadot.subscan.io.

One network, two chains that matter to you

Polkadot is a relay chain with other chains attached to it. The relay chain provides consensus and security; parachains and system chains run on top of it and share that security. Until late 2025 DOT balances lived on the relay chain itself. On 4 November 2025 the Asset Hub migration moved them: the wiki's migration article says your funds "moved from one network to another, but never left your account", and that staking and governance now happen on Polkadot Asset Hub. For a transfer this changes nothing you have to do — the address is the same, the wallet shows the same balance — but it changes where a transaction is recorded. A DOT payout today is a transfer on Asset Hub, and that is where an explorer shows it.

Blocks: every 6 seconds

The consensus page describes nominated proof of stake: DOT holders nominate validators, validators produce blocks under BABE in slots of "approximately 6 seconds", and GRANDPA finalises them once more than two-thirds of validators have voted for a chain containing them. Finality is separate from production: a block can be produced and then, a few blocks later, finalised, and a finalised block is never reverted. The chain-state page uses the same 6-second figure for Asset Hub. Compared with Bitcoin's 10-minute blocks this is fast; compared with Solana's sub-second slots it is slow, and it is the number any confirmation count for DOT is multiplied by.

What a confirmation means here, and why the page may not show one

On most coins on this site the route data carries a confirmation count, and the status page shows it. For DOT it does not at the moment: the route may be paused at the provider, and while it is paused the data this site is built from has no count, no arrival time and no price for DOT. Rather than guess, the page shows nothing. When the route is active again, the form lists DOT and the status page shows how many Asset Hub blocks a deposit waits for, as for any other coin.

The existential deposit, in two sentences

Polkadot has a minimum balance for an account to exist: the chain-state page gives it as 0.01 DOT on Polkadot Asset Hub, reduced from 1 DOT on the relay chain by the migration. An account that falls below it is reaped — removed from the chain state together with the remainder — and the accounts page notes that transaction fees alone cannot cause that. The key still works; the account is simply recreated the next time it receives enough.

This is the one Polkadot rule that can turn a payout into a refusal. A payout to a brand-new address must be larger than 0.01 DOT or the chain will not create the account. The form's minimum is far above it, so this matters only when you send your entire balance away and leave your own account under the deposit: the dust is then gone and the account is reaped. Keep a little DOT behind, or send everything deliberately.

A Polkadot address is an SS58 string, and the same public key can be written for different networks with a different prefix. The accounts page of the Polkadot Wiki states it in one sentence: "Each network has its own address representation of the same public key." Read on 14 October 2026.

1… is Polkadot. The wiki says plainly that Polkadot addresses start with 1. The two example addresses on the accounts page are 48 characters long, which is the usual length, though the format does not fix it. SS58 carries a checksum, so a string with one character wrong is rejected rather than quietly accepted.

5… is the same key in generic form. Substrate's default prefix 42 produces addresses starting with 5, and the wiki notes that an address shown starting with 5 or with a capital letter "is therefore still valid" and refers to the same account — only the format differs. Any Polkadot wallet, and the address converter on polkadot.subscan.io, can show the 1… form of a 5… address. The form asks for the 1… form because that is unambiguously Polkadot: a 5… string could as easily be an address someone copied from a Bittensor wallet, where every address starts with 5 and the chain is a different one.

What the form accepts

For a DOT payout the form takes an SS58 address starting with 1 and checks the checksum. A 5… address, a Kusama address, a 0x… string or anything else fails. There is no memo or destination tag on Polkadot; the form has no field for one, and a personal wallet never needs one. When the route is active, the deposit address the form shows you is an ordinary Polkadot address that any wallet or exchange withdrawal can pay.

Which address to give

1. Your own wallet: the address from its Receive screen, set to Polkadot. If the wallet shows a 5… address, switch its network setting to Polkadot and the same key appears as 1….
2. An exchange: the address from its DOT deposit page, exactly as shown, with the deposit page saying Polkadot. Most exchanges do not use a memo for DOT; if one shows a memo, the form cannot carry it — ask the exchange how to deposit without it before using that address here.
3. Another person: ask for the Polkadot address and read the first character and the last four back to them.

After the Asset Hub migration

The address did not change. The migration article says standard users need no action; the only exception it names is Polkadot Vault on old versions, whose accounts may use a different derivation path on Asset Hub. If a wallet shows no balance after a payout, the article's advice is the right one: update the wallet, then check the address on polkadot.subscan.io, which shows the Asset Hub balance whether or not the wallet renders it.

On Polkadot a transaction is called an extrinsic, and a DOT transfer since November 2025 is an extrinsic on Asset Hub. Subscan at polkadot.subscan.io covers the relay chain and the system chains, so a search by address or by hash finds the transfer wherever it was recorded. The block pages used for the dates on this page were read there on 14 October 2026.

What an extrinsic page shows

A transfer opens with the block number and its timestamp, the status — pending, in a block, or finalised — the sender, the destination, the amount in DOT and the fee the sender paid. Below are the extrinsic hash, the module and call (a plain transfer is balances, transfer_keep_alive or transfer_allow_death) and the events the transfer emitted, including the Transfer event with both accounts and the amount in Planck. A block page shows the timestamp, the validator that produced it and every extrinsic it contains; block 1 of the relay chain, for example, is timestamped 15:36:18 UTC on 26 May 2020.

A deposit you sent

1. Copy the extrinsic hash from your wallet's history. It is the hash of the transfer, not your address.
2. Open it on Subscan. Not found usually means the wallet has not broadcast it, or it is being searched on the wrong chain — check that the search covers Asset Hub, where balances now live.
3. Check the destination: the deposit address from the form, exactly, and the amount.
4. Watch the status. Finalised means the transfer is permanent. When the route is active, the status page here shows the confirmation count as it grows.

A payout you received

1. Open the payout hash from the status page on Subscan.
2. Find your address as the destination of the Transfer event. The amount is "You get" from the form — the payout fee was already taken out.
3. If your wallet shows nothing, look up your address on Subscan: the balance tab shows the Asset Hub balance, and the article on the migration says to update a wallet that cannot display it.
4. Keep the hash. It is the evidence that the payout happened and what support on either side will ask for.

transfer_keep_alive and transfer_allow_death

The two transfer calls differ in one way that matters when you send your whole balance. transfer_keep_alive refuses a transfer that would take the sender's account below the existential deposit; transfer_allow_death goes ahead and lets the account be reaped. Wallets choose for you, and most use keep-alive by default. If a wallet refuses to send "everything", this is why: it is keeping 0.01 DOT behind so the account survives. What a block explorer shows about a swap does the same walk-through for other networks; Reading a swap status page explains each stage.

Polkadot's mistakes come from its two unusual rules — the existential deposit and the many-prefix address — and from the route being paused. Nothing lands on the wrong chain, because the form rejects foreign address formats.

The reaped account

This is the Polkadot-specific loss, and it is small. If you send away everything except, say, 0.004 DOT, that remainder is below the existential deposit and the chain removes the account and the remainder with it. The wiki's accounts page is explicit that having an account go below the deposit causes it to be reaped and that fees alone cannot do it — so a wallet's normal transfer, which keeps the account alive, never triggers this on its own; only a deliberate "send all" does. The key is not lost. Fund the address again and the account exists again.

Less arrives than the form expects

Most exchanges deduct their withdrawal fee from the amount you type. Type the swap amount and the deposit arrives short by that fee; the swap runs on what arrived, so the payout is smaller — and if the shortfall takes the deposit under the route's minimum, it cannot be processed as a swap at all. The exchange's withdrawal screen shows the amount it will actually send. Make that match the form. Minimums, maximums and network fees on small swaps explains how the minimum is built.

Wrong chain inside the same ecosystem

Polkadot, Kusama and the parachains all use SS58, and a wallet can show the same key in each form. The rule is simple: for DOT, the address starts with 1 and the exchange's deposit page says Polkadot. An address from a parachain's own network, even with a 1-like look, is not a Polkadot Asset Hub address; the checksum will usually catch the mismatch, and if it does not, the deposit page of whoever gave you the address is where to ask.

Why the form is strict. A finalised extrinsic on Polkadot cannot be reversed, and a payout to an address nobody controls stays there. The checksum, the prefix check and the refusal of 5… strings exist so that the only way to lose DOT here is to type an address you own on a chain you did not mean.

Polkadot changes by governance vote and runtime upgrade rather than by hard fork, and the changes that matter to a sender are few and dated. Dates come from the Polkadot Wiki and from block timestamps on polkadot.subscan.io, read on 14 October 2026.

Redenomination, August 2020. The unit changed, not the balances. The chain counts in Planck, and after Denomination Day one DOT was defined as 10^10 Planck instead of 10^12, so every holder saw a hundred times more DOT with the same Planck. The wiki's old redenomination article, no longer online at its address, named block 1,248,328; Subscan timestamps that block at 16:48:30 UTC on 21 August 2020. Any price or amount quoted from before that day is in old DOT.

Issuance, 2024 and 2026. The inflation page records two changes: in November 2024 Polkadot moved from a constant inflation rate to a fixed annual issuance of 120,000,000 DOT, of which 15 % went to the treasury and 85 % to stakers; and Referendum 1710, implemented in January 2026, replaced that with a capped, stepped schedule — 13.14 % of the remaining gap to a 2.1 billion DOT cap issued every two years, the first step on 14 March 2026. Neither change touches how a transfer works; both change what "total supply" means when you read it.

Asset Hub migration, November 2025. The largest change for a wallet user in years, and designed to be invisible: the same address, the same balance, a different chain recording it. The practical consequences are the lower existential deposit and the fact that a transfer is now found on Asset Hub rather than on the relay chain. The migration article says no action is required for standard users and names Polkadot Vault on versions 7.0 and older as the exception.

What has not changed. Six-second blocks, the 1… address, a checksum that catches typos, and finality that cannot be reversed. A Polkadot address from 2020 still receives DOT today — on Asset Hub now, with the same key.

Bittensor's chain, subtensor, is built with the same Substrate framework as Polkadot, so the two look alike from a wallet: SS58 addresses, extrinsics, a smallest unit with many decimals. The differences are in the numbers and the prefix. Figures were checked on 14 October 2026 against the Polkadot Wiki and the Bittensor documentation; the site's own counts come from its route data.

The prefix is the whole address difference. A Polkadot 1… address and a Bittensor 5… address can be the same public key written two ways — and that is exactly why the form does not accept 5… for DOT. A 5… string is Bittensor, or generic Substrate, or a dozen other chains; a 1… string is Polkadot. If someone sends you a 5… address "for DOT", ask the wallet to show it in Polkadot form.

Two keys versus one. Bittensor splits an account into a coldkey that owns funds and a hotkey that operates on subnets; the Bittensor documentation says to send TAO to the coldkey, because TAO sent to a hotkey can be stranded. Polkadot has no such split for an ordinary holder: one account, one address, staking and transfers from the same key.

Time. Ten Bittensor confirmations at 12 seconds each is about 3–8 minutes in the site's estimate. For DOT the status page shows the count once the route is active; at 6-second blocks a comparable count would finish sooner.

Routes. TAO has a route page into USDT on Ethereum and appears as a receiving coin in the form. DOT has no route page yet and is handled by the form on the home page only — when it is listed there, pick DOT and the other side as usual.