At 20:00 on June 15, 2021, Beijing time, Kusama officially announced that Proposal No. 310 passed the review of the committee, and the first parachain slot auction was officially launched.
As a milestone event in the Polkadot ecology, whether the slot auction can be successfully carried out is related to whether Polkadot and the Polkadot ecology can enter a real development period. At present, there are no technical problems that hinder the launch of the parachain.
To ensure a fair distribution of parachain slots in this auction, this auction will choose to utilize a modern variant of the Candle Auction for parachain slot bidding. Compared with ordinary candle auctions, this Polkadot parachain slot auction has added more random elements. The auction has a total of 7 days. The process is divided into two stages, namely a 2-day security period and a 5-day random period. : During the safety period of the first 2 days, each bidder can bid freely, and just raise the price up, which is very simple; in the random period of the next 5 days, the system will randomly select a time point to drop the hammer. The last bid (highest bidder) will win the parachain slot. Therefore, during the safety period, each bidder will test each others bargaining chips. If you are short-sighted, it is better to leave early; when the random period comes, everyone will start bidding without reservation, relying on both strength and game.
Industry insiders are paying as much attention to Kusama’s first parachain auction as Polkadot’s mainnet was officially launched last year. A number of high-quality projects in the Polkadot ecosystem are vying for the top spot, and users who hold KSM also hope to make good use of their own KSM, participate in Crowdloan to help promising projects and get rewards.
Currently the number one project on Crowdloan is Karura. As Acalas leading website, Karuras bidding performance is very eye-catching because people are very optimistic about the Acala project. According to the data on the chain, about 1,000 different addresses on the Kraken exchange alone contributed Karura’s native token KSM to support Karura; within 100 hours after Crowdloan went online, more than 9,300 different addresses on the entire network raised tokens worth $3 billion. As of 15:00 on June 16th, Beijing time, the total lock-up volume has exceeded 400,000 KSM, and the total number of participating addresses has exceeded 12,600, accounting for about 26.67% of the total votes, leading by a large margin.
In this regard, Su Ruitao, the co-founder of Karura and Acala, said: Judging from the current level of support for our launch of Karura on Kusama, and the subsequent launch of Acala on Polkadot, this phenomenon proves that the market is committed to interoperability. Active demand for operational decentralized finance products. We are so grateful for such incredible support and excited to introduce our DeFi product to the world.”
For this auction, Karura also provides social gameplay. Users can get an exclusive link by filling out the application on the bidding page. Users who register through the exclusive link will get 10% more KAR tokens, of which the inviter and the invitee will each get 5%. Moreover, currently all users who participate in Karura crowdfunding are rewarded with NFT, and the NFT obtained by participating in crowdfunding on other third-party platforms will have the logo of the third-party platform. These NFTs will have some auxiliary functions combined with Karura DeFi, which can be minted, traded and provide liquidity. In addition, there are many other mechanisms in the design.
Once Karura is successful in this auction, according to the crowdfunding terms, each contributor who lends a KSM will receive at least 12 KAR as a reward, of which 30% will be unlocked immediately, and 70% will be unlocked linearly within 48 weeks. After the auction is successful, Karura will launch various products and design a liquidity mining link to add additional rewards. If Karura fails to win any round of the auction, all funds will be returned.
Introduction to Acala Karura
Karura
Karura is positioned as a decentralized financial hub on Kusama, founded by the Acala Foundation. Karura Network, as Acalas leading network, participated in this Kusama slot auction. As a scalable network compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, Karura is optimized for DeFi and also provides a set of financial application products, including: trustless pledged derivative liquid KSM, supported by cross-chain assets The multi-collateralized stablecoin kUSD, and the decentralized exchange that applies the automatic market-making mechanism, all of the above only need to pay a very small gas fee during use, and can be paid in any token.
The team said that both Polkadot and Kusama are currently in a very early ecology and hope that more people will join in. The team has many years of in-depth research experience in the fields of Polkadot and Substrate, and has great advantages in technology, products, and ecology. Its product design is interlocking, and it is very demanding for users. Moreover, the team has added a smart contract module compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, allowing developers to develop more DeFi products. Therefore, the team hopes to compete with other projects of the same type, so that itself and the entire ecology can develop faster and better.
Acala
Acala is a one-stop DeFi center on Polkadot. Its core vision is to become an indispensable underlying infrastructure for the Polkadot DeFi ecosystem. Acala will enter the Polkadot ecosystem as a parallel link and share the security and interoperability provided by Polkadot. As the worlds first decentralized open financial alliance and Polkadot ecological financial center, Acala aims to create an open financial framework with the Polkadot ecosystem, bringing financial stability, liquidity and accessibility to global encrypted assets. At the same time, various decentralized financial applications have been built for users, such as: stable currency system for mortgage lending and core infrastructure such as decentralized exchanges, so as to create a better user experience; in addition, for developers Provides a set of smart contract modules compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine and WASM, which can directly interact with the Runtime layer, helping Solidity and Rust developers enter the Polkadot ecosystem with minimal migration costs, thereby building various types of Go on the Acala application layer Centralized applications, such as NFT and prediction markets, help the prosperity and development of the Acala ecosystem and create a complete Polkadot DeFi ecological chain.
The project has a wide layout and great prospects, so it needs to be supported by a strong team and funds. Based on this requirement, the Acala team was jointly initiated by the decentralized financial protocol Laminar team and the PolkaWallet team, and there are many venture capitalists behind it Institutional support and abundant funding.
At present, Acala has received official financial support from the Web3 Foundation, and has received investment from several world-renowned institutions including DFG, Polychain, Pantera, ParaFi, Hypersphere, Digital Currency Group, CoinFund, 1confirmation, HashKey, and Coinbase Ventures.
Difference between Karura and Acala
It is worth noting that Karura and Acala are different in positioning:
As a pioneer network, Karura is positioned as an innovative test field for finance and NFT, and has the following advantages:
The latest technology stack, rapid iteration;
For the Kusama cultural innovation community;
Try innovative products and new assets, such as NFT, collectible collateral, etc.;
Acalas pre-launch network.
Acala is deployed on Polkadot. It is positioned as a global new financial infrastructure, more customer-oriented, and provides financial infrastructure API and other docking work on the basis of legal compliance, bringing innovative financial products on the blockchain to the world. Ordinary users, so Acala has the following advantages:
Enterprise-grade security and stability;
Conservative and stable governance, risk control, and upgrades;
high-quality assets and collateral;
Enterprise-level, global partners;
Hybrid financial products are aimed at mass users.
Different from Ethereum, Acala Karura is both a platform chain and a smart contract, and its scalability and customization are extremely strong. What Acala Karura has to do is to promote technology to productization, and through these products to promote DeFi to mass users. At present, the Karura test network has been online for nearly 2 months, and test users are very active. Users can use test coins to experience various DeFi functions on the testnet.
Why did DFG invest in Acala?
From the perspective of the team background, the Acala team is jointly initiated by the decentralized financial agreement Laminar team and the PolkaWallet team, and the technical level is guaranteed. Its members have been working in the fields of Polkadot and Substrate for more than 3 years, and have great advantages in technology, products, and ecology.
The Acala team is interlocking in product design, which is very demanding for users. Moreover, the team added a smart contract module compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine and WASM, allowing Solidity and Rust developers to migrate more easily and develop more DeFi products.
The project is committed to becoming an indispensable infrastructure for the Polkadot DeFi ecosystem, so Acala has built a complete decentralized financial application for users, and provided a series of out-of-the-box DeFi components for developers, aiming to create a complete The Polkadot DeFi ecological chain.
Acalas current major functions endow users with liquidity without losing their mortgage assets and rewards, so that users can continue to participate in decentralized lending, leveraged transactions, crowdfunding of other high-quality projects, and other financial in service.
Acala consists of the Honzon protocol, a stablecoin that supports cross-chain multi-asset mortgages, and the Homa protocol, which releases the liquidity of pledged assets. Relying on its unique technological innovation, Acala allows the projects stablecoin aUSD to be freely converted and circulated among other Polkadot projects. In addition to using aUSD to exchange other currencies in decentralized exchanges, users can also use it in other parachain networks, such as conducting foreign exchange margin transactions on the trading platform LaminarChain, tipping and paying for some data queries on the Subsocial social platform services.
Acala is attached to the Polkadot ecology, and not only has Gavin Wood and Polkadot officially tweeted support for many times, but also has the official financial support of the Web3 Foundation, as well as the support of many famous venture capital institutions, with sufficient funds. There is a solid guarantee for the future development of the team.
DFG has firmly believed that Polkadot is the perfect combination of blockchain and Web3.0 since the initial stage of Polkadot ecological establishment. With the gradual development of the ecology, in 2021, DFG invested 20 million US dollars to establish the Polkadot Ecological Fund, which focuses on investing in start-ups that empower the Polkadot ecology. At the same time, DFG is also a member of the Council of Polkastarter and a sponsor of the Huobi Polkadot ecology. It has participated in investing in multiple Polkadot eco-native projects including Acala, Plasm, Bifrost, Crust, Darwinia, HydraDX, Zenlink, Equilibrium, Apron, etc. In addition, DFG also has a great layout in the direction of Web3.0, CeFi, DeFi, NFTs and so on.
