With $1.3 billion staked, Acala wins the first Polkadot parachain auction
The first-ever Polkadot ecosystem parachain slot auction was concluded with Acala, a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol operating on the Polkadot network.
Acala announced it had emerged as the victor. It was able to raise approximately 32.5 million DOT tokens, which is equivalent to $1.29 billion using today’s current market price, from 24,934 investors via an initial coin offering (ICO), which was structured as a crowdloan.
According to the official Twitter account of the project, “With over 32M DOT contributed by over 81,000 community members, Acala has won the first parachain auction on @Polkadot! Thank you to everyone who took part in this historic event. It’s a testament to the strength of @Polkadot that so many talented teams are in the running to be among the first five projects to launch on Dec 17. In this respect, we’re all winners. We’re looking forward to kicking off the multi-chain future with you!”
What you should know
This opening batch of five Polkadot parachains will be auctioned off by mid-December and then all the projects will go live simultaneously on the 17th of December. This is notably different from Polkadot’s sister network Kusama, which had its parachain auctions earlier this year. The notable difference between the two parachain auctions is that the first winner would have the opportunity to go live first on Polkadot’s ecosystem.
DFG, a digital asset management firm run by James Wo, who is also an early investor in the Polkadot ecosystem, contributed 500,000 DOT tokens, which at today’s price is equivalent to $19.84 million, to Acala.
The second auction began yesterday and it is scheduled to end on the 25th of this month. The projected winner of this second auction is Moonbeam, who came second in the first auction. So far, moonbeam is leading the auction with 34.39 million DOT tokens which are equivalent to $1.37 billion from 46,629 contributors as of the time of this writing.
Moonbeam is an Ethereum compatible smart contract platform designed for building interoperable applications. It is currently in active development and is expected to launch its main-net by the end of the year.
Investors will receive one Moonbeam token which is going by the ticker ‘GLMR’, for each DOT they pledge, with 30% of rewards immediately available for claiming and the remaining 70% shall vest throughout the 96-week lease. The reward pool consists of 100 million which is 10% of its token supply. The token inflation for Moonbeam stands at 5% per annum.
Conclusion
The first auction saw 10 projects bring in approximately $3.5 billion worth of DOT. At the end of the auction, Moonbeam had gathered $1.36 billion. However, Acala was in the lead for 63% of the time during the auction period, giving it the best chance of securing the slot, even though the project raised less than Moonbeam to the tune of $1.30 billion. Acala raised its funds from 81,000 wallets.
DOT currently trades $39.68, down 4.25% as of the time of this writing.