Acala (ACA), the first parachain to emerge on the Polkadot (DOT) network, has just raised $250 million to increase the adoption of its stablecoin, the aUSD. New projects wishing to structure themselves around the aUSD will be able to benefit from financial assistance to help their development.
250 million to support adoption of the aUSD
Acala (ACA), a parachain of the Polkadot Network (DOT), has just raised $250 million to support emerging DeFi projects within its ecosystem.
More than 30 investment funds participated in the round, including Alameda Research, Arrington Capital, Digital Currency Group, Hypersphere, Jump Crypto, Kraken Ventures and Pantera Capital.
This capital injection will be used to support projects wishing to structure themselves around the Acala dollar (aUSD), Acala’s stablecoin. This will include decentralized applications (dApps), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and all DeFi projects in the network.
“As Polkadot opens its doors and more parachains come online this year, Acala is poised to become Polkadot’s primary decentralized stablecoin and DeFi hub,”
said Kanav Kariya, president of the Jump Crypto Fund.
In addition to the 30 investors, nine parachains in the Polkadot network will work together with Acala to drive adoption of aUSD, including Moonbeam, Astar Network, Centrifuge, Efinity and HydraDX.
Projects wishing to benefit from this capital injection will simply need to fill out an online application directly on Acala’s website and will then be eligible for up to $50,000 in funding. A larger financial contribution may be made on an exceptional basis provided that the projects concerned are structured around the aUSD.
An ecosystem centered on the aUSD
The aUSD, issued by Acala, is the native decentralized stablecoin of the Polkadot and Kusama networks. It is mined from several reserve assets like DOT or ACA, Acala’s token.
In addition, aUSD can be integrated with all blockchains connected to Polkadot and Kusama and their underlying applications.
As a stablecoin, it is secured by several assets such as DOT, KSM, ACA or even KAR, in the same way that the LUNA token secures the UST on the Terra blockchain.
According to the Acala team, the aUSD will also be supported by tokens from other parachains and even cross-chain assets like Bitcoin (BTC) or Ether (ETH).
At the time of writing, the total locked-in value (TVL) of the aUSD is worth over $77 million.