Decentralized finance protocol Acala was announced as the winning project in Polkadot’s inaugural parachain auction this week, beating fellow competitor Moonbeam to the finish line with a seismic total of 32.5 million DOT ($1.28 billion) raised from 24,934 contributors.
Acala is a multi-functional DeFi platform built on Polkadot that enables developers to build smart contract applications with cross-chain capabilities, as well as being compatible with Ethereum. Its top investors include Digital Currency Group, Polychain Capital and Alameda Research, among others.
In the case of Acala, all of the proceeds from the crowdloan initial coin offering are classified as “crypto debt” and, therefore, must be paid back by the project following the conclusion of the rental agreement.
The Iota Foundation, an open-source, nonprofit entity endeavoring to support the Iota ecosystem, announced the upcoming launch of a staging network, Shimmer, this week alongside an accompanying token asset, SMR.
Shimmer is a layer-one sandbox platform that will enable builders and developers to test the efficiency and compatibility of their decentralized applications within the DeFi and NFT space, prior to deployment on the Iota mainnet.
Expected to launch in early-2022, the network will also facilitate community governance confirmations for Iota’s large-scale network upgrades, including the upcoming programmable multi-asset ledger, smart contracts, full decentralization and sharding.
