Too Long; Didn't Read
Polkadot launched its first official parachains last week. Parachains are self-contained and can support their own complete crypto ecosystems. But they're limited in that they often run into scalability problems because they rely on massive amounts of raw processing power to validate their transactions. In one fell swoop, that creates a system that not only scales well, but can also siphon traffic away from other overloaded blockchains, solving their problems automatically. The Binance Chain was a proposed solution to the scalability problem – except for sharding and side-processing schemes.