Denomination Day: Ecosystem Project Guidance

Denomination Day Public Notice

At block number 1,248,328 on August 21st at approximately 16:40 UTC, the DOT token will undergo a redenomination from its original sale. ‘New DOT’ will be 100x smaller than ‘DOT (old)’. Therefore, your DOT balance will be 100x higher and the price per DOT will be 100x lower. The percentage of the DOT you own relative to total supply will remain unchanged. This will not affect the total value of your position. DOT token holders still own an equal share of the network as before. See the Polkadot blog post for more information.

Below are recommended best practices for any ecosystem project that displays DOT values:

1. Projects should "split" DOT at or very shortly after the redenomination, which will occur at block number 1,248,328, approximately August 21st UTC 16:40. Projects should not “split” DOT before this block. Doing so would put your users at risk. “Splitting” DOT means changing the number of base units (“Plancks”, the Polkadot equivalent of a “satoshi”) that constitute a single DOT on the front end. ‘DOT (old)’ have 12 decimals of precision, while ‘New DOT’ will have 10. The total number of Plancks in the system does not change.
2. Projects should immediately change the DOT ticker to ‘DOT (old)’.
3. After the redenomination (block number 1,248,328), projects that have “split” DOT should change the ‘DOT (old)’ ticker to ‘New DOT’ [in italics]. We will notify the community when they should begin using the ‘DOT’ ticker again.

As an example, below is a comparison of the display of 1,000,000,000,000 Plancks with the current pre-redenomination DOT representation, ‘DOT (old)’, and the post-redenomination ‘New DOT’:

Dot Project: Further information for DOT Token holders

For more information and detailed communications guidance during this step of the DOT project, see our Ecosystem Project Redenomination Guide.