Acala Ecosystem Update — November 2021

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Acala

6 min readDec 9, 2021

Acala Wins the First Polkadot Parachain Auction, Project Venkman Launches Brand Loyalty and NFT Platforms on Acala’s EVM+, OriginTrail Brings Its Decentralized Knowledge Graph to Acala’s Developer Ecosystem, SubQuery Network Launches on Acala’s EVM+, and Reva Designs Acala’s Crowdloan NFT

November was an incredible month for Acala and the ecosystem! With over 32 million Polkadot (DOT) tokens contributed (~$1.3 billion USD) by over 81,000 community members in 7 days, Acala secured the first parachain slot on Polkadot. Acala will officially be among the first five teams launching on Polkadot on December 18th! In step, the Acala ecosystem saw exciting activity with the announcement of three new integrations: Project Venkman, OriginTrail, and SubQuery Network.

Read on for our November report.

Acala Wins the First Polkadot Parachain Slot Auction

With over 32 million Polkadot (DOT) tokens contributed ($1.3 billion USD) by over 81,000 on-chain participants from all over the world over 7 days, Acala won the first Polkadot parachain slot auction on November 18, officially earning the privilege to launch its layer-1 platform and DeFi liquidity hub on Polkadot. During the crowdloan, Acala’s community contributed 23,710,723.6 DOT using Acala’s Liquid Crowdloan DOT ($LCDOT) product, allowing them to maintain access to their underlying DOT liquidity over the course of Acala’s two-year parachain slot lease. After an exciting event, the team is now gearing up for launch!

What’s next? Over the next couple of weeks, the remaining four parachain slots will continue to be auctioned off through mid-December. Acala, along with the four other parachain slot winners, will launch on Polkadot on December 18th, 2021. The launch will begin with the rollout of its layer-1 blockchain platform followed by its products: liquid DOT staking (LDOT), aUSD decentralized stablecoin, Acala Swap AMM-style DEX, EVM+ environment, and liquid crowdloan DOT (LCDOT). Further details on the launch process will be unveiled in the coming weeks. All of Acala’s products are built into the blockchain itself so developers in the Acala EVM+ can leverage the liquidity and functionality out of the box.

As a reminder, all participants who contributed Polkadot (DOT) tokens to the Acala Crowdloan will receive Acala’s ACA token as a reward, giving them a share of the network. The total ACA supply is 1 billion ACA tokens. The Acala team designated 17% of ACA token supply (170 million ACA tokens) for crowdloan rewards, made up of 15% in base rewards + 2% for various bonuses. The duration of Acala’s Parachain Slot Lease is 96 weeks (approx. 2 years).

100% of ACA will be distributed to users after the network launches (December 18th) and token transfers have been enabled. 20% of ACA will be liquid and transferable right away and the remainder of ACA will be vested/unlocked linearly (every block) over a 96 week period. For LCDOT contributors, 100% of LCDOT will be distributed along with ACA rewards. Users receive 1 LCDOT for every 1 DOT contributed to the Acala Crowdloan.

100% of LCDOT will be liquid and usable within Acala DeFi.

For all the details on the Acala Crowdloan and the rewards, check out the blog post here.

Project Venkman to Launch Brand Loyalty and NFT Platforms on Acala; theCHIVE Set To Debut to 10 Million Monthly Users

Project Venkman, an e-commerce engagement solutions provider, announced Acala as its technology partner for launching a portfolio of brand engagement solutions using on-chain loyalty points and NFTs. Project Venkman selected Acala as its technology platform due to its compatibility with Ethereum technology, ability to customize for Venkman’s current and future client needs, low transaction costs, ability to perform at scale for millions of users, and high performing engineering team.

Venkman and Acala’s partnership will begin with a loyalty and NFT platform built for Venkman’s first client, theCHIVE, and its 10 million monthly active users based primarily in the United States. theCHIVE has a robust e-commerce business, having generated over $400 million in revenue to date.

Learn more about Project Venkman here.

OriginTrail To Launch on Acala, Bringing Its Decentralized Knowledge Graph to Acala’s Developer Ecosystem

OriginTrail has announced the intent to integrate its multi-chain Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG) on Acala. The integration will put OriginTrail’s global mesh network of indexable assets (real world and digital) and data into the hands of developers in the Acala ecosystem. OriginTrail comes with years of experience in supply chain and decentralized systems, as well as partnerships with Oracle, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, British Standards Institution (BSI), and the Scan Association (including The Home Depot and Walmart). OriginTrail has previously deployed its technology on Ethereum, Polygon, and xDAI.

Acala will integrate with OriginTrail in a variety of ways:

Bridging the TRAC token to Acala for a potential listing as an accepted fee token, as well as giving any DApp on Acala the ability to integrate TRAC (money markets, DEXs, etc.)
Integrating the OriginTrail Substrate pallet into Acala’s parachain, enabling any DApp developer to leverage information from the DKG
Integrating OriginTrail smart contracts into Acala’s EVM+ development environment
Integrating Acala’s aUSD stablecoin into the OriginTrail ecosystem to be used by network participants, node operators, and other use cases

Read more about how OriginTrail is entering the Polkadot ecosystem and the variety of ways they will integrate with Acala in the original blog post here.

SubQuery Network to Launch on Acala’s EVM+, Decentralizing Polkadot’s Leading Data Indexing Service

Acala is pleased to announce that SubQuery, the leading data indexing solution in Polkadot, has chosen Acala’s parachain for the launch of the SubQuery Network. The Acala team and SubQuery shared the same vision, to grow the Polkadot ecosystem and help the world move towards a decentralized future.

By launching on an EVM-compatible chain like Acala, SubQuery’s token generation event (TGE) will seamlessly allow participation by investors into SQT from the Ethereum ecosystem through the use of Metamask. With Acala’s EVM+, users can even link their Ethereum addresses with their Polkadot addresses, overcoming the need to manage multiple accounts.

For more information on the launch of SubQuery on Acala, check out the original blog post here.

Reva Designed Acala’s Exclusive Crowdloan NFT

The Acala team wanted to thank the community for the incredible support during the crowdloan by partnering with artist Reva to create an exclusive NFT for crowdloan participants. Reva’s passion for the visual presentation of mathematical functions and autonomous system simulation can be seen throughout her work.

We interviewed Reva to help our community get to know her and the inspiration for the Acala Crowdloan NFT. When asked about the style behind the Acala NFT, she shared:

I usually write codes to make art. But this time I combined three modes to create the artwork. First, I did a digital painting to draw the central figure of Acala. Then, I made several layers of the background using Illustrator. Finally, I made a program to generate the dynamics of the mandala and the shifting of different layers of the background. There are many details in the whole artwork.

To learn more about Reva, what inspires her work, and the exclusive Acala NFT read the full interview here.

About Acala

Acala is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform optimized for DeFi and scaling DApps to Polkadot. The blockchain has built-in DeFi protocols for application developers to leverage, including a decentralized stablecoin (Acala Dollar — aUSD), a trustless staking derivatives (liquid DOT — LDOT), and a decentralized exchange.