Announcing the Acala Mandala Testnet, Proof-of-Liveness Partners, and Ecosystem projects
By Ruitao Su & Fuyao Jiang
We are thrilled to launch the first trilogy network for Acala — the Mandala Test Network, announce our partners, and the Acala Ecosystem Program.
An Unfolding of Acala Trilogy Networks
The Acala Network will power cross-chain capable multi-collateralized and decentralized stablecoin, and serve as a DeFi building block for the Polkadot Ecosystem. The evolution of the Acala Network will be marked by trilogy networks:
- Mandala Test Network: is a risk-free and value-free playground for us, users and developers to test drive functionalities of Acala. Expect bugs, chaos, and unannounced reboots.
- Karura Network: is an unaudited and experimental release of Acala that will join the Kusama network as parachain. It will have economic value represented as KAR native tokens, and KSM can be used as collateral for kaUSD.
- Acala Mainnet: will be connected to the Polkadot network upon its launch.
Mandala Network
Expect Bugs and Unannounced Reboots
Mandala is the test network for Acala. It allows users, teams, and developers to test drive stablecoin functionalities, get a taste of Acala’s governance, and build integration in a risk-free environment.
Why Mandala?
Well, why Acala in the first place? Acala is the immovable deity and the gate guardian in Buddhism. Symbolically, stablecoin is the guardian foundation of decentralized finance. Mandala is meant to be Acala’s gateway into the two networks hereafter, where we can have a taste of Acala, try things out freely and safely in terms of functionality. Whereas economically and governance-wise, the Karura network will serve the experimental purposes for Acala.
While there is no value attached to Mandala, it is a great playground to kick the tires and test drive.
Test Drive Mandala
Mandala is launched with the following features:
- Create, update and manage multi-collateralized aUSD loans, supporting test DOT and test BTC as collaterals
- An auction module to handle asset liquidation
- A simple oracle implementation with a K’th largest algorithm to tolerate up to K compromised servers
- Built-In decentralized exchange to support instant swaps amongst aUSD, ACA and other supported tokens
Governance is limited to the Sudo module for Mandala, while the council set-up is for demonstration purposes only. Check out more in the Mandala Get Started Guide. Or if you can’t wait, get some test tokens, jump straight onto the truck and have a drive yourself.
Though there is no reward for validating Mandala, feel free to run the docker provided, or use a hosted service like OnFinality.
Check out the telemetry and the console UI.
Proof-of-Liveness (PoL) Partners
While the Acala Network will leverage Polkadot’s shared security and do not need dedicated validators itself, it will still require what we call Proof-of-Liveness (PoL) nodes to maintain the operation of the Acala network, and propose new blocks to validators for verification.
PoL Nodes will in return receive rewards in kACA in Karura network, and ACA in Acala mainnet. With no particular order, these partners will provide the initial liveness of the Acala network: OnFinality, P2P Capital, and Stake.Zone.
The Acala Ecosystem Program
The Acala network is ultimately a community-owned ecosystem. The Acala stablecoin is decentralizedly generated and governed. There are many reasons to choose Acala as the stablecoin provider for your project, and you may have unique questions and needs.
We believe the Acala Ecosystem Program would be a good starting point to form closer collaboration, for us to provide better support to teams integrating with Acala, and co-create incentivize programs, etc. These teams have become the inaugural Acala Ecosystem Program projects: Chainlink, ChainX, Dipole, Plasm Network, PolkaWorld, Subsocial, and XanPool.
If you would like to join the Acala Ecosystem Program, submit your interest here.
Stay Updated with Acala
Website: https://acala.network
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AcalaNetwork
Medium: https://medium.com/acalanetwork
GitHub: https://github.com/AcalaNetwork/Acala
The Acala Stablecoin Project is proudly supported by the Web3 Foundation
About Web3 Foundation
Web3 Foundation funds research and development teams building the stack of technologies that form the basis of the decentralized web. It was established in Zug, Switzerland by Ethereum co-founder and former chief technology officer Dr. Gavin Wood.
For more information on Web3 Foundation, visit web3.foundation.
About Polkadot
Polkadot is the first interoperability protocol that enables blockchain networks of all kinds to work together under the protection of shared security. Applications from decentralized finance and energy to gaming and communications will thrive on Polkadot, forming the basis of digital jurisdictions in Web 3.0. Polkadot is the first project spearheaded by Web3 Foundation.
For more information on Polkadot, visit polkadot.network.
