Acala Mandala Festival Season #4 Halloween Give-Back

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Acala

5 min readOct 31, 2020

Ever since our inaugural edition back in March, Mandala Festival has been our way to showcase new developments, celebrate our progress, and share much joy with the community. We’ve been extremely grateful for your support, enthusiasm, engagement in network activities and discussions.

Last season was the hottest ever, with Ren and Laminar joining the party, and a considerable influx of new participants and a swirl of meaningful activities:

👥 14,500 + new accounts
⛓️ 140,000 + meaningful transactions
💰 $52 million locked total value (testnet)
💲 $25 million aUSD issued (testnet)
🎉 Over 2,350 users received awards

Mandala TC5 Optimised for DeFi

As we launch this fourth season of the festival on Halloween night Saturday 31st of October, it’s perhaps time to reiterate Acala’s mission, as the decentralized financial (DeFi) hub of Polkadot: to make it fast and easy to use or build financial applications, improving trading efficiency and saving valuable time. We have recently launched Karura network to extend our mission to serve the Kusama community as its primary DeFi hub. We have launched a new testnet candidate (TC5) alongside this festival with the following updates doubling down on our effort to accelerate DeFi innovations.

The most recent updates in optimizing for DeFi a reality are as follows:

Oracle Gateway: this is an open, more decentralized, and DeFi optimized oracle infrastructure available to all DApps built on Acala. It allows multiple oracle service providers to provide price feeds, and DApps will enjoy Quality of Service regardless of how congested the network is and whichever provider they choose. See orml-oracle.
Generic NFT support: we deployed orml-nft to enable any NFT publishers to build and leverage Acala’s DeFi ecosystem (Kusama also adopted this module to support NFT natively). We’ve eaten our own dog food and deployed Acala’s publisher NFT module to issue collectibles for Mandala Festival participants.
Tokenized DeX LP share: Acala Swap is an automatic market maker type decentralized exchange. We have tokenized LP shares to support liquidity bootstrap.
LDOT sub-staking accounts: via Acala’s trustless staking facility, you can nominate more than the default 16 validators, and enjoy optimized returns and liquidity, while also have differentiated delegated voting rights on Polkadot. LDOT will be one of the base financial instruments powering new economic innovations based on PoS.

Mandala Fest #4: Halloween Give-Back

Building Acala is a community effort, and Mandala Fest then becomes a celebration of this growing community and the wealth of possibility that awaits us all in building web3. All past festival-goers would have a chance to claim Acala & Karura Halloween themed NFT badges.

These collectibles don’t have a monetary value nor a market, they are our mere way of honoring our shared experience and saying THANK YOU. Newcomers to the community who complete required tasks would also have a chance to claim these collectibles.

Here’s what the festival looks like and the rewards

Part I (31-October-2020 to 06-November-2020 | Award Pool: 2,000 ACA + 2,000 KAR): Welcome Newcomers — complete required transactions to qualify.
Part II (31-October-2020 to 13-November-2020 | Award Pool ≈ 30,000 ACA + 30,000 KAR): Thank You — reward claim by qualified past festival participants
Part III (31-October-2020 to 13-November-2020 | Award Pool: 3,000 ACA + 3,000 KAR): Bounties — bugs, stickers, emojis or else

Get Started

Get started with Acala including creating a wallet and obtain test tokens here
Check out these guides to use Honzon stablecoin, Acala Dex, and Homa staking derivative.
Check out guides on cross-chain trading with Laminar and Ren here
All rewards are published here

Full Schedule and Rules

Part 1: Welcome Newcomers

Duration: 31-October-2020 to 06-November-2020 (week one)
Award Pool: 2,000 ACA + 2,000 KAR

All qualified users will share the reward pool
All rewards will be recorded and published
Note these rewards are lucky draws, not guaranteed

Participation Rules:

Get test aUSD from the faucet, fees are payable in aUSD
Users completing three meaningful transactions will be rewarded

Meaningful transactions include:

Use DeX to swap tokens
Use DeX to provide liquidity and transfer LP Tokens to another account
Use the Self Service Loan service to collateralize for Acala Dollar (aUSD)
Use Homa protocol to get staking derivative LDOT
Mint renBTC and use it in the above activities

Part 2: Thank You

Duration: 31-October-2020 to 13-November-2020 (week one & two)
Award Pool ≈ 30,000 ACA + 30,000 KAR

Participation Rules:

Each account which participated Mandala TC2/TC3/TC4 can get 1 ACA + 1 KAR（If all testnet you participated, you will get 3 ACA + 3 KAR ）
The nonce of each Mandala TC2/TC3/TC4 account must greater than or equal to two
All rewards need be claimed in Acala Dapp
You can see the rewards in your wallet Airdrop account

Part 3: Bounties for Bugs, Sticker & Emojis sets (Throughout the Festival)

Duration: 31-October-2020 to 13-November-2020 (two weeks)
Award Pool: 3,000 ACA + 3,000 KAR

Please allow one week from your submission for our review.

Participation Rules:
Bug Bounties

Find bugs for the following repos:
https://github.com/AcalaNetwork/Acala
https://github.com/AcalaNetwork/acala-dapp
https://github.com/polkawallet-io/polkawallet-flutter (Acala part)
Bugs are judged on significance and severity by the Acala Engineering team and are awarded roughly based on the levels here
Please include your Acala Mandala Address in the Github issue for easy prize distribution

Stickers & Emojis sets

Rewards are not guaranteed for this category
Feel free to submit Acala/Karura themed Sticker & Emoji sets
Sticker & Emoji sets selected for our Discord channels will receive rewards
Please include your Acala Mandala Address in the submission

🎉 Let the festivities begin

We’re excited to celebrate Mandala Fest together with you all! We hope the bountiful rewards, range of engagements and the landmark cross-chain DeFi opportunities will appeal to many of you. As far as test driving Polkadot is concerned, Acala gives you pole position and the fastest route from zero to hero. As always, the team is on standby to answer any questions and help you make the most of the Festival. Please join our channels to get VIP access to support and our community 👇

Join Us

To keep up to date with progress on the Acala parachain launches on Polkadot and Kusama, subscribe to the Acala Newsletter.

About Acala

Acala is the decentralized financial hub of Polkadot that makes it fast and easy to use or build financial applications, improving trading efficiency and saving valuable time. The platform offers a suite of financial primitives: a multi-collateralized stablecoin backed by cross-chain assets like Bitcoin, a trustless staking derivative, and a decentralized exchange to unleash liquidity and power financial innovations. Acala is the de-facto open platform for finance applications to use smart contracts or built-in protocols with out-of-the-box cross-chain capabilities, security and financial optimizations.