Acala Treasury Raises Over $61M from 26k+ Contributors Ahead of Acala’s DeFi Smart Contract Platform Launch on Polkadot

Dan Reecer
Acala
Published in
4 min readSep 8, 2021

Acala has successfully completed the Build Acala: Ready the Treasury event, garnering over $61M USD in contributions from over 26,000 community members around the world.

These funds, held in Polkadot’s DOT token, will enable the network to become self-sustainable by self-funding future parachain slots on Polkadot, enable the network itself to help bootstrap new DApps and protocols built on Acala’s DeFi smart contract platform, and enable the network to fund its own growth.

This two-part network ownership event took place the week of April 12, 2021 and August 30th, 2021. ACA tokens will be distributed to contributors when Acala launches on Polkadot after winning a parachain slot auction and token transfers have been enabled.

Why build the Acala Treasury?

The Acala Treasury is a Protocol DAO and reserve of digital tokens, native (ACA) and foreign (e.g. DOT) to the Acala ecosystem, funded from Acala’s protocol fees and community contribution events. With a healthy treasury in place, the community of network owners can fund operational and economic initiatives, including:

  • Self-funding a parachain slot on Polkadot
  • Bootstrapping liquidity for DApps built on Acala’s network
  • Platform and protocol operations and improvements
  • Network security operations and enhancements
  • Software and tool development
  • Community, marketing, and event funding
  • Any other future community Acala Treasury Proposals (ATPs)

Acala — The Ethereum-compatible DeFi smart contract platform on Polkadot

Acala is the DeFi and liquidity hub of Polkadot. It’s an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform optimized for DeFi with built-in primitives and liquidity including the Acala Dollar (aUSD) decentralized stablecoin, Liquid DOT staking (LDOT), and the Acala Swap AMM-style DEX.

The Acala engineering team has configured the custom-built Acala EVM+ to provide a development environment analogous to Ethereum and a fully Ethereum-compatible experience for DeFi users (MetaMask), while still getting the full power, speed, and customizability of Polkadot’s modular blockchain framework, Substrate. Upon Acala’s upcoming network launch on Polkadot, any DApp team can deploy their EVM-based smart contracts onto the Acala EVM+ with minimal changes while using the same tooling they utilize in other Ethereum environments (MetaMask, Truffle, Waffle, etc.).

DeFi teams will now be able to smoothly integrate with Acala, and the entire Polkadot ecosystem, for composability with billions in new TVL, hundreds of thousands of new users, a seamless user experience compared to their current status quo.

Building DApps on Acala enables DeFi teams to capture billions in new TVL on Polkadot with minimal code changes via assets like DOT and Liquid staked DOT (LDOT), access hundreds of thousands of new Polkadot-native users, and ability to plug into a the most liquid network on Polkadot (including bootstrapping liquidity from the newly-funded Acala Treasury).

Preparing for launch on Polkadot

Although timing is uncertain as we wait for Polkadot to announce crowdloans and parachain slot auctions, the next major event in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem is the start of Polkadot crowdloans. To keep up on the latest with Acala’s crowdloan, subscribe to our newsletter.

Build with Acala

⭐️ Get in touch with the team if you’re looking to scale your Ethereum DeFi project to Polkadot.

We are on a mission to bring more financial accessibility, opportunity, and prosperity to everyone on the planet through a new, open financial system. Thank you to everyone who contributed to Build Acala! Welcome to the Acala community — we are excited to continue to build with you.

Thanks,

The Acala Team

About Acala

Acala is the DeFi and liquidity hub of Polkadot. It’s a layer-1 Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform optimized for DeFi with built-in liquidity and primitives including the Acala Dollar (aUSD) decentralized stablecoin, Liquid DOT staking (LDOT), and the Acala Swap AMM-style DEX. Acala allows developers the best of Ethereum and Substrate, leveraging an EVM smart contract environment with the ability to fully access the power and customizability of Substrate.

Acala was founded in Oct 2019, and today has received five Web3 Foundation grants, has backing from Coinbase Ventures, Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital, Arrington XRP, ParaFi, CoinFund, and other top firms, and has a distributed team in New Zealand, China, Europe, South America, and the United States.

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