Acala’s Testnet Parachain, New Funding Round, Smart Contracts and Ethereum-Compatibility
It’s time for the September 2020 version of Building Acala, and 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. Looking back on August, it was a month highlighted by major milestones with the Acala parachain beginning to function and successfully complete token transfers on the Polkadot testnet, a new round of investors and strategic partners, and the unveiling of smart contracts and Ethereum-compatibility on Acala. Continue below for all the happenings around the Acala ecosystem, and afterward, we invite you to come join us on Twitter and Telegram.
Development Updates
- Acala Unveils Smart Contracts and Ethereum Compatibility for Polkadot DeFi (Medium): Acala now supports the EVM and ink! pallets on Substrate, enabling Solidity and Wasm-based Smart Contracts for developers.
- Acala Launched First Parachain on Polkadot Testnet (Medium): Acala has launched its parachain on Polkadot’s testnet in preparation for mainnet deployments on Kusama and Polkadot.
- First successful cross-chain token transfer and trade in Acala DEX (Twitter): Acala has enabled a full DeFi suite on a testnet parachain: test DOT can be transferred to the Acala parachain trustlessly, used as the underlying fee token, and used to participate in DeFi e.g. use DeX to trade, or collateralize for USD credits.
- First successful cross-chain stablecoin transfer from Acala to Laminar on testnet (Twitter): Acala has been integrated with the Laminar parachain testnet for trustless cross-chain token transfers and DeFi functionality. Demo video:
- Acala built and released the *xtoken* pallet for token transfers in the Polkadot ecosystem (Github): Any parachain using the xtoken pallet, built by Acala, can now integrate with Acala for token transfers. Xtoken was released as a common good library for any parachain to use.
- Acala built and released code to help any Substrate-based chain to become a parachain on Polkadot or Kusama (Github): Check out this PR above along with an ongoing refactoring effort (Github) to support chains running as independent Substrate chains or parachains.
Other upcoming development updates:
- Acala’s next testnet release will enable smart contract capability on Acala with guidelines on the production readiness process
- Watch for more cross-parachain and cross-blockchain integration coming up soon
Ecosystem Updates
- Acala Raises Additional Series A for Polkadot DeFi Hub Ahead of Upcoming Parachain Launch (Medium): Acala has raised an additional round of funding, along with partnerships for DeFi expertise, liquidity provisioning, and risk management (Twitter).
- What We Learned from Acala’s Extreme Testing Simulation (Medium): Acala’s 3-week testnet campaign has concluded, highlighting the importance of a Canary Network and leading to several technical improvements to the network.
Some of the stats we saw during this community testnet campaign:
| ✅ 14,500 + new accounts | ⛓️ 140,000 + meaningful transactions | 💰 $52 million locked total value | 💲 $25 million aUSD issued |
Award highlights are as follows and full results published on Github:
😎 Week 1 awards went to 2,105 users out of 10,525 qualified
⌛ Week 2 awards went to top 10 traders with an average return of 24,200%
🌋 Week 3 awards went to 200 users
✍️ 10 bloggers/vloggers awarded
🐞 45 bug hunters awarded
🤖️ 1 code bounty awarded
Acala in the Press
Events
- Acala participated in a Cross-chain DeFi AMA with Acala, Laminar & Ren for 650+ people
- Sep 16–18: Acala will speak at The 3rd China International Blockchain Business Future Development Summit by Chain News and inkrpto
- Acala Co-founder Ruitao judged the first Kusama hackathon, Hackusama, and Acala supported as technology and education partner (Hackusama with Acala). Although this hackathon is over, the building continues! We are looking for excellent teams building DeFi or Finance related products. Come build with Acala (Github — Build with Acala).
Join Us
| Website | GitHub | Acala Wiki | Discord | Telegram | Riot Chat |
To keep up to date with progress on the Acala parachain launches on Polkadot and Kusama, subscribe to the Acala Newsletter.
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.
Acala is the decentralized financial hub of Polkadot.
WRITTEN BYDan Reecer