Have you heard the latest Polkadot news? Even though Polkadot’s parachain auctions haven’t formally begun, we already know three of the projects competing for a slot.
A lot of smart money is betting that Polkadot will play a major role in the future of finance. The protocol already has more than $33 billion of value in capitalization, and its first round of parachain auctions is about to kick off, setting developers free to bring their own DeFi projects to life in a high-bandwidth environment offering low transaction fees. With a parachain slot successfully secured, these projects can enter mainnet production, attract more users, and generally ramp up crypto use cases and adoption around the world.
Only three projects have so far announced their Polkadot crowdloan campaigns, opening up waitlists to track interest from their communities. Those community members will pledge their DOT in support of the projects they want to win a slot. Right now the self-starting projects seizing the day are Acala, Manta Network, and Equilibrium — you can check out Acala’s waitlist here, Manta Network’s here, and Equilibrium’s waitlist here.
Acala is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform built for DeFi on Polkadot. It seeks to function as a DeFi hub for the entire Polkadot ecosystem. Acala users can mint aUSD stablecoins using collateral from Polkadot-connected parachains, unlocking the liquidity of staked DOT tokens by turning them into L-DOT. The Build Acala event raised approximately 260,000 DOT for the Acala Treasury. Acala’s global community funded the network’s on-chain reserve of digital tokens — it’s co-owned and managed by ACA network owners.
Manta Network bills itself as a privacy-preserving layer built on top of Polkadot. Its first use case is as a privacy-first decentralized exchange, built as a layer-1 solution. In other words, privacy exists in the network’s core architecture, rather than seeing it be an added bonus sitting on top of another blockchain. By harnessing Substrate technology, Manta users are free to privately transact in an interoperable ecosystem across blockchains.
