Hackusama with Acala
The very first hackathon within the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem is live and running until August 14th. Join now!
Consider this your official invitation to Hackusama with Acala, where we support and help teams create valuable DeFi projects for Polkadot and Kusama.
Acala will launch as the DeFi parachain for Kusama and Polkadot, two heterogenous sharded blockchain networks. We are offering up a suite of out-of-box DeFi primitives such as stablecoin, staking derivatives and decentralized exchange to power more DeFi applications. We’ve also open-sourced (see links below) common utility modules such as oracle, multi-currency, generic monitoring framework for teams to use.
Built using Substrate, Acala is a highly customizable blockchain framework, with a lot of financial optimization including Quality of Service for oracle operations, and FlexiFee which natively supports transacting US Dollars paying US Dollars as fees and more.
Why Acala?
Acala helps lower the technical and economic barriers of building finance-related DApps on Polkadot. We’ve already established a vibrant ecosystem, with 20+ projects such as synthetics, margin trading platforms and Bitcoin bridges building with Acala. We would love to have Hackusama teams create the next killer DeFi project using our framework.
Our offerings are production-grade and production-ready. The full-stack DeFi primitives, pallets and SDKs available are:
- Honzon stablecoin: multi-collateralized cross-chain stablecoin aUSD using Bitcoin & DOT as collaterals
- Homa staking derivative: release staked DOT liquidity for DeFi usage
- DeX: constant product automatic market maker type decentralized exchange
- Oracle: out-of-box aggregator, operator setup, advanced fee customization and quality of service
- Multi-currency: a unified interface for enabling multi-currency support for Subtrate-based chains
- Governance: implemented with progressive decentralization
We’re excited for you to try it all out so here’s the necessary documentation to get you going:
- Acala Dapp (Use this as an example of how to use the JS SDK)
- Wiki Documentation
- Acala JS SDK
- Acala Console
- Open Web3 Stack open library
An Education Partner
Acala has an all-star Substrate and Rust dev team with a great track-record of building high-quality projects (Laminar & Polkawallet) in the Polkadot Ecosystem.
We are delighted to therefore be an education partner for Hackusama, providing technical support and advice to all hackathon teams building DeFi projects. The co-founder of Acala and CTO of Laminar, Bryan Chen, will be answering questions and helping out throughout the hackathon. He is a core contributor to the Substrate codebase and a lecturer of the first Substrate/Polkadot online course endorsed by Dr Gavin Wood. You can find him on Github with the handle xlc.
Shaopeng and Jianjiang are also prominent contributors to various Substrate libraries and will assist Bryan in providing technical support to the teams.
You’ll find the Acala team in the Hackusama Discord where we’ll be running office hours in the general chat to answer all your DeFi build questions.
Get Started
Until the smart contract is production-ready, the best way to develop with Acala is by building pallets. As a pallet in Acala runtime, you will be able to access and leverage all the pallets from Acala and Open-Web3-Stack open library which include:
- Acala modules (Github): Honzon stablecoin, Homa staking derivative, DeX, governance
- Open-Web3-Stack open library (Github): oracle, multi-currency
Note for Hackusama teams: Because projects created during hackathons typically need to cut some corners to ensure an MVP can be built as quickly as possible, you don’t need to worry too much about pushing PRs to Acala / Open-Web3-Stack. Fork the projects and make whatever changes are required in your own use cases.
Follow the quick steps below:
- Fork & Clone https://github.com/AcalaNetwork/Acala
- Create a new repo from this template https://github.com/AcalaNetwork/ecosystem-template
- Add your repo as a submodule by updating the Acala fork (in step #1) to include your repo (in step #2) in ./ecosystem-modules
- Update cargo files etc. in the Acala fork: ./Cargo.toml, ./runtime/Cargo.toml, ./runtime/src/lib.rs to include the pallet from step #2
- Start development
To cut corners:
- Skip step 2 & 3
- Copy & paste the pallets from https://github.com/AcalaNetwork/ecosystem-template into a new folder in Acala fork ./ecosystem-modules
- Continue from step 4
- Optional: Fork and modify pallets in ORML
- Fork https://github.com/open-web3-stack/open-runtime-module-library
- Change the ./orml to point to the ORML fork by changing git remote
Advanced Tips:
- Use various Currency trait for token programmability https://github.com/open-web3-stack/open-runtime-module-library/blob/master/traits/src/currency.rs
- Use with_transaction_result / with_transaction so you can rollback on error: https://github.com/open-web3-stack/open-runtime-module-library/blob/b328153041fde62dcfe89fc49954ad7acff99ed3/utilities/src/lib.rs#L17
- Use Acala pallets as a code example of how to use ORML
The Acala community
For Hackusama questions and support, you can email us or DM in the Hackusama Discord. To become a part of our core community, you can join our Discord, Telegram and Riot channels. To learn more about Acala, see acala.network, Medium, GitHub and Acala Wiki.
