Polkadot’s multi-stage launch, which started in May of 2020, has finally been completed, as all the auction-winning parachains have gone live and are currently producing blocks on the network.
Five Parachains Live On Polkadot
The first batch of parachains was onboarded yesterday and includes the five auction-winning parachains from Acala, Moonbeam, Astar, Parallel Finance, and Clover. All five of these parachains were supported extensively by the Polkadot community, with crowd loans of around 100 million total DOT locked.
Back in 2016, the Polkadot Whitepaper outlined the network’s core features and charted out its shared multichain design. The launch of the parachains was the final step in fully launching the Polkadot network. Its thriving community of DOT holders will have the responsibility and the power to approve any future upgrades with the help of the network’s on-chain governance system.
What Are Parachains?
Parachains are individual blockchains running in parallel within the Polkadot ecosystem to improve interoperability. Auctions are held to allocate slots on Polkadot’s main blockchain, its Relay Chain. The five parachain teams that have won the auction will be able to lease a slot on the Relay Chain for a stretch of 96 weeks. The growth of the ecosystem and the mergers of metaverses will lead to multiple protocols gaining higher visibility. Instead of a single blockchain, it will lead to several interconnected chains.
The Winning Parachains
In November, Acala won the first parachain on Polkadot slot after a close run with Moonbeam. Even though Moonbeam received more DOTs than Acala, the candle auction format led to Acala being ahead when the candle blew out and thus winning the auction.
Co-founder of the Acala parachain, Bette Chen, said,
“After taking a bet on Polkadot and the Substrate framework when we started building over two years ago, we couldn’t be more excited to be launching Acala’s parachain to provide a DeFi platform and native, decentralized stablecoin (aUSD) to the Polkadot ecosystem and beyond.”
However, Moonbeam did not lose out of the race, as it was successful in winning the second parachain auction. The team credited the win to a successful crowd loan campaign, where the Moonbeam community contributed over 35 million DOTs (around $1.4 billion).
The third parachain auction was won by Astar. The fourth parachain slot on the Polkadot network was secured by Parallel Finance, after 30,000 contributors pooled in their DOT tokens, leading to a contribution of over 10.75 million DOTs, equal to roughly $306 million. The fifth and last slot in this lot of parachains was won by Clover Finance, with a contribution of over 9.7 DOTs.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
