Building Acala — November & December 2020
A Recap of Karura’s Crowdloan and Parachain Auction, EVM, Ampleforth, Open Oracle Gateway for Polkadot, and more
Happy Holidays! This is a special edition of Building Acala bringing you updates for November and December 2020. If you’re new to Acala, welcome! 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.
Last couple of months have been about building and giving back — we have made significant breakthroughs in EVM and Substrate composability and compatibility, deployed the Open Oracle Gateway with Acala, Band and DIA as initial oracle network providers, welcomed Ampleforth in joining the ecosystem and bringing AMPL to Acala/Polkadot, and launched Karura (Kusama’s DeFi Hub) Crowdloan campaign ahead of the upcoming parachain auction and launch.
Research & Development Update
- Project Bodhi is a composable and innovative EVM stack on Substrate to deliver full-stack composability between EVM and runtimes for developers, and a single-wallet cross-chain experience for users. Read more on Github. Further details will be revealed in an upcoming post and demo.
- Open Oracle Gateway is our approach to create a more open, inclusive and decentralized oracle framework for Acala DeFi hub, Polkadot, Kusama ecosystem and beyond. The Gateway allows multiple oracles networks to provide services to any DApps deployed on or connected to Acala, while enjoying Quality of Service and free transaction fees. The Gateway is up and running on Acala testnet, Acala, Band and DIA are the initial oracle network providers. Read more below:
- Ampleforth on Acala/Polkadot: AMPL the rebasing currency and elastic finance building block will be available on Polkadot via Acala network. Ample will become a 1st-class fee token on Acala, Ampleforth contracts will be deployed on Acala’s EVM with minimal changes while enjoying seamless integration with Acala’s DeFi primitives and liquidity, thanks to Project Bodhi. Read more below:
- Decentralized Sovereign Wealth Fund: is the next-gen DAO and unforkable AUM. Read more below and on Parity’s blog.
- Security Audit: SRLabs and Slow Mist have completed their audits on Acala including all runtime implementations, ecosystem module RenVM, the community maintained ORML modules that Acala depends on, as well as the front-end interface for Acala’s DApp. The Trail of Bits audit is scheduled to commence in Jan 2021. Read more below:
Launch Plan & Community
- Launch Timeline: Rococo parachain testnet V1 has been released and will accept parachains early Jan 2021. This is a solid technical indicator of parachain readiness. If testing and auditing all go as planned, then Kusama will enable parachain auctions, followed by Polkadot. Acala will be amongst the first parachains and launch on both networks.
- Karura’s Parachain Launch Crowdloan Waitlist is Open: Karura (Acala’s sister network on Kusama) will host the first crowdsourced parachain launch. The Crowdloan model is pioneering a new way of fair network bootstrapping: KSM holders lock their tokens to help us lease a parachain slot and gain access to Kusama’s shared security, they will get all principles back at the end of the lease, while receiving KAR tokens as reward for their support. The goal is to distribute our tokens to as many KSM holders as possible, and a bonus referral program is set up to achieve this goal. The campaign started a few days ago, and now already attracted 3.3k people joining the Crowdloan waitlist! Join Karura’s Crowdloan waitlist here and view the Karura Crowdloan website.
- The Substrate Runtime Developer Academy launched by Acala, Industry Connect and Parity, and supported by wide range of community partners is a professional level program to help developers building production-grade applications for Polkadot. The first intake has 52 students from 19 countries inc Argentina, Brazil, Russia, US, Turkey and more. Polkadot Treasury has recently granted the program a scholarship fund of 643 DOTs to support students in need. Read more on the Treasury proposal or sign up for the next cohort (Feb 2021) now!
- Vote Acala for Polkadot & Kusama Council Member: for a more enlightened DeFi future. During our tenure, we have participated in 37 Kusama council votes and 37 Polkadot council votes.
- Token Distribution: one of our goals is to distribute our tokens as widely and fairly as possible. Looking back 2020, we have distributed roughly 1 hundred thousand ACA and 3.5 million KAR tokens to the community through testnet participation — the Mandala Festivals, bounty programs and hackathon prizes.
Events & Media
- Polkadot Decoded: the first Polkadot conference has attracted over 6,000 attendants, watch Acala’s co-founder Ruitao Su’s presentation here.
- Hackathons: we have supported the following hackathons:
- Polkadot’s Hello World on Gitcoin
- Polkadot Encode Hackathon here
- Substrate Dorahacks in Hangzhou here
- Acala’s co-founder Ruitao on Pantera’s Conference Calls “Deconstructing DeFi” with Alchemy’s co-founder Joe Lau here
- DeFi Startup Acala to Build New Oracle Network For Polkadot Ecosystem by CoinMarketCap
- DeFi on Polkadot by Cointelegraph
Join Us
Discord | Website | Twitter | GitHub | Acala Wiki | Telegram | Riot Chat
To keep up to date with progress on the Acala parachain launches on Polkadot and Kusama, subscribe to the Acala Newsletter.
Work with us — we’re hiring 😎
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.
About Karura
Karura is the decentralized financial hub of Kusama. The network is built as Acala’s sister network with nearly the same codebase — the two platforms enable a scalable, user-friendly, and fast cross-chain DeFi ecosystem for Kusama and Polkadot. Karura’s parachain is a fast-moving and powerful platform that enables efficient, inexpensive, and sophisticated financial applications, improving trading effectiveness and saving time. The platform offers a suite of financial primitives: a multi-collateralized stablecoin backed by cross-chain assets like Kusama and Bitcoin, a trustless staking derivative, and a decentralized exchange to unleash liquidity and power financial innovations.
