Weekly news from Kusama&Polkadot #27
1. Unique Network won the 14th auction on Polkadot
Unique Network is the winner of the 14th parachain auction on Polkadot. It will be onboarded at the beginning of lease 8 with the winners from auctions 15–18. Unique raised 822k DOT from 3592 participants in the crowdloan.
Unique Network is another parachain that focuses on NFTs. Unique will enable composable NFTs with advanced features and tool range such as sponsored transactions, re-fungibility, flexible economic models, sustainable NFTs and interoperability within the Polkadot ecosystem and beyond.
2. USDT Tether launches on Kusama
USDT, the largest dollar-pegged stablecoin with capitalization exceeding $80B is launching on Kusama. While it's not the first stablecoin on Kusama, it's still BIG news for the ecosystem.
Recently, the Karura dollar (kUSD) running on Kusama changed to the Acala dollar (aUSD), but as you know from different blockchains such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and others, the variability of stablecoins on the liquidity market is positive for the chain itself.
The goal of USDT is to run on Kusama and later on also on Polkadot since accessibility and interoperability is the overarching goal of both networks.
USDT will be minted on the Statemine parachain, which is a common good parachain focused on the deployment of both fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), similarly to Statemint on Polkadot.
Tether’s USDT is the third biggest cryptocurrency according to CoinMarketCap and is live also on blockchains Ethereum, Solana, Algorand, Tron, EOS, Liquid Network, Omni, Tron and Bitcoin Cash’s Standard Ledger Protocol.
3. AmsterDOT conference starts today
The first Polkadot conference after Covid lockdowns is about to start in Amsterdam. Speakers on the conference will be from the main parachain projects, such as Dan Reecer from Acala with his speech aAn overview of aUSD, Jakub Greguš from HydraDX covering the topic of Economic efficiency as the killer feature of Dotsama or Henry Duong from Moonbeam with his speech called Deep dive into Moonbeam EVM compatibility.
The second parallel part of the conference is the hackathons covered by leaders of Parity, Talisman, HydraDX, Subsquid, Acala, Moonbeam, Astar or Interlay.
You can check all the speakers on the web of the AmsterDOT conference.
4. Quartz launches on Karura swap with extra mining rewards
Karura Swap, an AMM-style decentralized exchange on Kusama, has joined forces with Unique Network to introduce its latest trading combo QTZ/aUSD and QTZ/KAR! The pairs will go live in Bootstrap mode on 13th April 2022 at approximately 22:00 hours UTC with trustless trading scheduled to go live following 168 hours of one- or two-sided bootstrap provisioning on Karura.
To mark this special occasion, Unique Network has allocated liquidity mining rewards totaling 2,000,000 QTZ. Acala has allocated 3,000 aUSD and 1,500 KAR for incentives. The two reward pools will be available to QTZ/aUSD and QTZ/KAR liquidity providers over the span of the next three months. The reward pool also provides a 50% bonus for a Loyalty Program available to Karura Swap users who keep their rewards in the pool until the program’s closed.
5. Astar introduced AstarPass mapping your native and EVM addresses
Astar recently introduced their AstarPass as a new feature, which is mapping between your Astar Native Address and your Astar EVM address. By using AstarPass, you can have some exclusive perks and benefits.
On a practical level, holding an AstarPass allows dApps on the Astar public blockchain to offer you those benefits for staking your ASTR tokens on them. As a dApp staker (nominator), dApps can reward you with NFTs, airdrops, access to events and even more.
AstarPass is the front-end implementation for AstarBase and will allow users to connect with Polkadot and an EVM wallet (such as MetaMask), and at the same time write address pairs to the EVM smart contract. AstarBase as the EVM smart contract will then verify on-chain, that those addresses are valid and that users are participating in Astar dApps staking.
You can now also mint your ASTRANAUT NFT for free just for claiming your AstarPass.
Consider supporting us by the nomination of your tokens to Kusama or Polkadot validator going by the POLKADOTTERS name.
