Weekly news from Kusama&Polkadot #17

1. SORA secured parachain slot on Kusama

SORA is the winner of the 24th parachain auction on Kusama by raising 9 666 KSM worth over $1,8 mil.

SORA has more than one utility. Firstly, its network in the Polkadot ecosystem now has its own parachain slot on Kusama, later on, it will compete also for its own parachain slot on Polkadot. By having its own slot, it will use its own built-in tools such as atomic token swaps, bridging tokens to other blockchains and some other tools focused on DeFi that could be interconnected by other parachains.

Secondly, it's a new economic system that decentralizes the concept of central banks.

2. Astar raised $22M to boost interoperability of Polkadot

Astar Network raised $22 million in strategic funding round. The investors that supported Astar are big names in the crypto sphere including Polychain Capital, Alameda Research, Alchemy Ventures, Crypto.com and some notable angel investors such as Polkadot creator Dr. Gavin Wood, Richard Ma or Japanese professional football player Keisuke Honda.

Those funds will help build out interoperability between Polakdot and other Layer 1 chains. Lately, Polygon and BinanceChain were connected to Astar.

Astar has some more amazing news. Announced was the first native lending protocol called Starlay, which will allow users to quickly and easily borrow tokens on top of Astar and that will be released at the end of February.

Astar Network has locked over 50% of the total supply. TVL is $416.4M (50.4%).

What is Astar? Astar Network is EMV compatible parachain, which means it allows Ethereum smart contracts to coexist and communicate to the Polkadot-native smart contracts.

3. Kintsugi is live on Kusama with its kBTC token

Kintsugi is now live on Kusama mainnet. Its main purpose is to bring liquid bitcoin into the Kusama network by its 1:1 backed kBTC token. kBTC can now be used by Kusama parachains such as Karura, Moonriver or Shiden.

Kintsugi is a canary network of interBTC, developed by Interlay.

4. Acala distributed crowdloan rewards

Acala distributed rewards to the crowdloan participants. ACA and LCDOT are now transferable as we informed last week. DeFi primitives will be launched soon.

Acala is the historically first winner of the parachain auction on Polkadot. To this date, Acala has $600 million + TVL, over 200k token holders, and 3M+ fintech clients to onboard.

Also, consider supporting us by the nomination of your tokens to Kusama or Polkadot validator going by the POLKADOTTERS name.