Acala DeFi Hub Wins First Polkadot Parachain Slot

The inaugural Polkadot parachain auction has come to a close. The race was close but Acala DeFi Hub is the winner of this first slot.

Acala has taken the first Polkadot parachain slot, edging out Moonbeam which came in as a close runner-up.

The auction ended on November 18. Acala took the prize with 32.5 million DOT worth an estimated $1.3 billion staked in support of the project.

Acala stated that more than 81,000 community members contributed to the crowdloan enabling the project to become the first parachain on Polkadot. However, DotMarketCap reports that there were 44,723 contributions.

Despite this discrepancy, the outcome is still the same.

Following the victory, the Acala team stated they were going on a hiring spree seeking to expand several areas. These include engineering, product, operations, and growth.

Acala is a fully-fledged DeFi hub for the Polkadot ecosystem. It has plans for a stablecoin called Acala Dollar to bootstrap cross-chain DeFi and a DEX on Polkadot.

Parachain auction round 2

Acala just edged out Moonbeam as it secured 65% of its 50 million DOT hard cap.

Moonbeam is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bridging protocol. It enables Ethereum developers to port smart contracts and dApps into the Polkadot ecosystem. Moonbeam will likely win the second parachain auction which began on November 18.

Meanwhile, it is currently way ahead in the second auction with 34.4 million DOT staked worth an estimated $1.4 billion.

Decentralized application layer two scaling hub Astar Network is in second place. It has 7.7 million DOT pledged worth around $303 million.

Participants that stake Polkadot’s native DOT token in support of various competing projects are rewarded with their own native tokens if they win the auction.

The winner of the auction is retroactively determined by the “Dutch candle” method. This method decides when the auction closes after all the bidding has finished preventing last-minute manipulation.

Acala and the next four auction winners will all be on-boarded as official parachains on Polkadot on December 17.

DOT price continues to slide

Polkadot’s native token has taken a 4.6% hit on the day it won, dropping below $40 for the first time since October 13. DOT has now retreated 28% from its November 4 all-time high of $55.

DOT prices surged in anticipation of the auction launch earlier this month. However, they have not managed to escape the downward momentum of the current market-wide correction.