Subsquid Partners with Acala on EVM+ Tooling and XCM Use Cases

SQD (previously Subsquid)
SQD Blog
Published in
3 min readDec 19, 2022

After many months of work behind the scenes, we are glad to officially announce that Subsquid has partnered with Acala. Subsquid already supports indexing for EVM+ smart contracts on both Acala and its sister network, Karura. Now, the two teams have agreed to work together on multiple initiatives that will improve both developer and user experiences across the entire Polkadot ecosystem.

Acala and Karura run a fundamentally different EVM implementation than other Polkadot ecosystem chains, which use Parity’s “frontier” EVM pallet. This EVM+ pallet (built by Acala) is intended to bring the best of Ethereum and Substrate together and has enabled Acala to achieve three design goals: (1) empower users to have a seamless Acala experience whilst using a Substrate or Ethereum-compatible wallet like MetaMask, (2) enable protocol-level composability for EVM and Substrate runtime, and (3) give developers a wider range of tooling support.

Since @subsquid/substrate-processor@1.9.0 squid SDK natively supports handlers for indexing smart contracts deployed to Acala and Karura, below are a couple use cases for developers along with related documentation:

To subscribe to events emitted by a specific contract(s) and/or matching a topic filter, use

addAcalaEvmExecuted(contract: ‘*’ | string | string[], options?: AcalaEvmExecutedOptions & NoDataSelection) 

Documentation

Similarly, to subscribe to EVM logs emitted by unsuccessful EVM transactions, use

addAcalaEvmExecuted(contract: ‘*’ | string | string[], options?: AcalaEvmExecutedOptions & NoDataSelection)

Documentation

XCM, Analytics, and Ecosystem Development

Both the Subsquid and Acala teams are working hard on tooling for, and implementations of, the Cross-Consensus Messaging (XCM) format. As new HRMP channels get opened between parachains to enable XCM-based messages, squid SDK will be essential to developers on Acala and Karura, as well as on other Substrate-based chains that would like to interact in some way with the Acala ecosystem.

In due time, the Subsquid and Acala teams will also release some documentation of recent implementations of squid SDK that were used when investigating the incident concerning aUSD last August. Here at Subsquid, we are very much looking forward to working together with Acala to continue bringing the highest standard of safety for user funds to the Polkadot ecosystem.

Build on Acala!

To begin building a squid on Acala or Karura, developers may clone the Substrate template, follow this tutorial and refer to this documentation on Subsquid’s EVM+ support. For technical support, please feel free to join the SquidDevs chat on Telegram.

About Acala

Acala is a decentralized finance network powering the aUSD ecosystem. The core product, Acala USD, is a decentralized, multi-collateral, crypto-backed stablecoin serving as the native stablecoin of the Polkadot ecosystem. Acala’s Ethereum-compatible blockchain has built-in DeFi protocols for application developers to leverage, including a trustless staking derivative (liquid DOT — LDOT), a decentralized exchange, and the EVM+, a hybrid EVM offering fully Ethereum-compatible development environment plus full compatibility with Substrate.

Build with Acala

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About Subsquid

Subsquid is the team behind squids, a new standard for Web3 data extraction and transformation. Squids already power hundreds of applications across dozens of EVM, Substrate, and WASM-based chains. With modular architecture and a host of advanced features, Subsquid offers the most resource-efficient and developer-friendly way to build, test, and deploy customized GraphQL APIs and ETLs for blockchain-facing applications.

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SQD (previously Subsquid)
SQD Blog

The Web3 Data Layer Powering devs with access to data on over 150+ chains, including EVM, SVM, Substrate and more. https://sqd.dev/