Polkadot Parachains and VCs Team Up to Launch $250M Acala USD Ecosystem Fund

Polkadot parachain project Acala Network has announced the launch of a $250 million fund to support ecosystem builders driving demand for its flagship product, the aUSD stablecoin.

Polkadot Ecosystem Pools $250M to Drive Acala USD Utility

Polkadot’s top builders have rallied behind Acala’s cross-chain interoperable stablecoin.

Today, Acala Network announced the launch of the $250 million “aUSD Ecosystem Fund” in partnership with nine Polkadot parachain teams and more than a dozen supporting venture capital funds. The goal of the Ecosystem Fund is to support and invest in early-stage teams building products and services in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem that will drive demand and utility for Acala’s flagship stablecoin, aUSD. Commenting on the specifics of how the Fund will be operated, Acala’s chief growth officer Dan Reecer said:

“The fund will be operated by Acala. Teams will apply to the fund on Acala’s website, then the Acala team will handle vetting of teams, as well as helping prepare teams for fundraising. This support will include engineering, product, tokenomics, community, and fundraising strategy. Once teams are adequately prepared, they will be introduced to participating funds for potential participation in fundraising rounds.”

Polkadot parachain teams supporting the initiative include Astar Network, Centrifuge, Efinity, HydraDX, Manta, Moonbeam, OriginTrail, Parallel, and Zeitgeist. Renowned crypto venture funds including Alameda, Jump Crypto, Kraken Ventures, 1Confirmation, ParaFi, Pantera, and Spartan also participated in raising money for the Ecosystem Fund.

Acala is a scalable, high-throughput Polkadot parachain supporting forkless upgrades and custom optimizations. Its ecosystem is optimized explicitly for DeFi use cases and centered around the Maker-inspired, overcollateralized aUSD stablecoin. Acala has designed aUSD as a natively cross-chain interoperable asset, meaning it can be used across the entire Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem without needing to be wrapped.

Acala’s goal is for aUSD to become the primary stablecoin of the Polkadot ecosystem. To that end, it has partnered up with nine other parachains sharing the security of the Polkadot Relay Chain to build up liquidity, trading pairs, yield, and overall utility for aUSD across the ecosystem. Commenting on aUSD’s growth and the current degree of proliferation, Reecer said that aUSD is still in launch mode that it will take some time before growth starts to accelerate. “The AUSD stablecoin was just launched on Acala’s mainnet six weeks ago, so aUSD and Acala as a network are still very much in launch mode,” he said. “As soon as Polkadot enables cross-chain functionality, growth will begin to accelerate as aUSD will soon be on DEXs, money markets, and other DApps on various parachains such as Astar and Moonbeam.”

The $250 million Ecosystem Fund announced today will help Acala fund early-stage teams building decentralized exchanges, money markets, payments protocols, derivatives, and other products leveraging and increasing the utility of the aUSD stablecoin.

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