Acala Is Now Live on Polkadot

Acala, the first project to win a Polkadot parachain slot auction, has launched its DeFi-focused network on mainnet.

Acala Launches on Polkadot

Acala Network has gone live on Polkadot.

The DeFi project announced that its ACA token had launched in a Tuesday tweet, while the team’s Chief Growth Officer Dan Reecer noted that the network was preparing to go live today. “Acala is building toward a HyFi vision, or Hybrid Finance, that is bridging the worlds of Web2 fintech and neobanks with DeFi to bring improved yield and financial outcomes to non-crypto users without them having to touch any complex crypto tech like MetaMask or private keys,” he wrote.

According to the project’s roadmap, the network’s full launch will be conducted in phases. The first one is allowing users to send and receive ACA and participate in on-chain governance. The network has reportedly launched with over $600 million in total value locked in Liquid Crowdloan DOT (LCDOT) tokens and over 200,000 token holders globally.

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, announced today that it would list the token and open trading pairs against BTC, BUSD, and USDT as soon as they become transferable on mainnet.

Acala won the first Polkadot parachain auction in November with a community contribution of Polkadot’s DOT token worth over $1.27 billion. Parachains are individual, application-specific blockchains connected to Polkadot’s Relay Chain. Acala secured its place on the Relay Chain by narrowly outbidding Moonbeam for one of 100 available parachains in a candle auction.

The Acala Network markets itself as “an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform optimized for DeFi.” The network will offer a suite of financial products, including a native decentralized exchange, a trustless liquid staking derivative, a decentralized stablecoin, and an upgraded Ethereum Virtual Machine dubbed EVM+.

Acala will roll out these products in phases across a series of undisclosed dates. So far, Acala has only enabled ACA token transfers on the network. According to CoinGecko data, ACA is currently trading at around $2 per coin, putting the project’s market capitalization at around $133.3 million.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this feature owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.