Three Projects Are Already Competing For A Polkadot Parachain Slot

Have you heard the latest Polkadot news? Even though Polkadot’s parachain auctions haven’t formally begun, we already know three of the projects competing for a slot.

A lot of smart money is betting that Polkadot will play a major role in the future of finance. The protocol already has more than $33 billion of value in capitalization, and its first round of parachain auctions is about to kick off, setting developers free to bring their own DeFi projects to life in a high-bandwidth environment offering low transaction fees. With a parachain slot successfully secured, these projects can enter mainnet production, attract more users, and generally ramp up crypto use cases and adoption around the world.

Only three projects have so far announced their Polkadot crowdloan campaigns, opening up waitlists to track interest from their communities. Those community members will pledge their DOT in support of the projects they want to win a slot. Right now the self-starting projects seizing the day are Acala, Manta Network, and Equilibrium — you can check out Acala’s waitlist here, Manta Network’s here, and Equilibrium’s waitlist here.

Acala is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform built for DeFi on Polkadot. It seeks to function as a DeFi hub for the entire Polkadot ecosystem. Acala users can mint aUSD stablecoins using collateral from Polkadot-connected parachains, unlocking the liquidity of staked DOT tokens by turning them into L-DOT. The Build Acala event raised approximately 260,000 DOT for the Acala Treasury. Acala’s global community funded the network’s on-chain reserve of digital tokens — it’s co-owned and managed by ACA network owners.

Manta Network bills itself as a privacy-preserving layer built on top of Polkadot. Its first use case is as a privacy-first decentralized exchange, built as a layer-1 solution. In other words, privacy exists in the network’s core architecture, rather than seeing it be an added bonus sitting on top of another blockchain. By harnessing Substrate technology, Manta users are free to privately transact in an interoperable ecosystem across blockchains.

Equilibrium is another major DeFi player in the ecosystem claiming to be a revolutionary cross-chain DeFi protocol combining pooled lending with synthetic asset generation and DEX margin trading. With all this DeFi functionality in one place, Equilibrium users can lend, borrow, trade, stake, and earn high-interest APY with their assets. They have also just announced their fluid xDOT staking for participants of future parachain auctions, but its details are yet to be disclosed. Equilibrium raised 250,000 DOT during its DOT/EQ token swap, and that amount will be staked for its parachain on Polkadot. 

What projects will announce their crowdloan strategies for Polkadot auctions next? Several projects come to mind: Moonbeam, Phala, Astar, Bifrost and Centrifuge. It’s a decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly — the cost of winning a parachain slot was considered on the order of 1 million DOT earlier. But given the hype around recent Kusama auctions, this number may gradually increase to way higher figures — up to 10 million DOT.  At today’s market prices, that works out to more than $400 million USD. If you’d like to participate, you better figure out where to buy Polkadot — it’s going to be very exciting to see which projects secure their slot and help form the basis of a new and improved financial system.