Weekly news from Kusama&Polkadot #40
1. BridgePort won the 22nd auction on Polkadot, Integritee the 23rd one
BridgePort is the winner of Polkadot’s 22nd parachain auction by locking 76k DOT tokens. BridgePort is bringing gaming and blockchain technology platforms together to build the infrastructure on Web3, metaverse space, and the NFT ecosystem globally.
The winner of the 23rd parachain auction on Polkadot is Integritee. Integritee is the most scalable public blockchain solution for securely processing sensitive business or personal data.
2. Heiko and Altair are winners of the parachain auctions on Kusama
The auctions no. 45 and 46 know their winners, which are projects, that already have their first slot from the past, but it's going to expire soon.
Heiko (canary of Parallel Finance) and Altair (canary of Centrifuge) won two recent auctions and are preparing themselves for the change of the slot to the new one. We will see this strategy for self-funding another slot from Basilisk (canary of HydraDX) in the next auction. So no crowdloans for these projects, who did their first crowdloan in the first few batches of auctions on Kusama.
3. Polkadot is gradually integrating with Cosmos
Polkadot and Cosmos are the two biggest interoperable networks, that connect together various different blockchains (parachains in the Polkadot terminology). It's to the benefit of both networks to interconnect their tokens and dApps together. In recent times, we have seen a few of those integrations.
Moonbeam is now integrated with Osmosis, which is a Cosmos-based DEX that now allows one-click token swaps of DOT tokens with the tokens from the Cosmos ecosystem. This will simplify the cross-chain transfer between Polkadot and Cosmos. Moonbeam integration into Cosmos is made available via the Axelar Network, which allows bridge services and cross-chain communication for smart contract protocols.
Besides that, Kujira, the L1 grown-up DeFi platform that runs on Cosmos, will integrate with Acala. Kujira is about to launch on Karura’s EVM+ with the launch of their innovative liquidation solution, ORCA. With ORCA, DeFi users will be able to bid on at-risk collateral, making them available for purchase to anyone and providing an effective liquidation mechanism for Acala’s native stablecoin aUSD.
The third, yet-to-be-planned integration, is between Composable Finance and Cosmos.
4. Efinity will power Final Fantasy NFT collectibles
Efinity, the next-generation blockchain for NFTs, which is a Polkadot-based platform from Enijn, will power NFT collectibles for the Final Fantasy.
Enjin recently announced a partnership with Square Enix to create branded digital collection of Final Fantasy VII 25th anniversary cards and figures using Efinity parachain. The digital collectibles will be accessible to consumers who purchase physical trading cards and toys in the physical collection, which is expected to launch in 2023. By using Efinity, a scalable and fully-interoperable NFT parachain, users can experience interactive NFTs without even realizing they’re on the blockchain, as stated CTO of Enjin, Witek Radomski.
5. Astar, Basilisk, and Amplitude integrated Acala’s native stablecoin aUSD
The integration of aUSD, the native stablecoin of Acala and Karura, is growing rapidly. It's without a doubt, that aUSD is now the native stablecoin of Polkadot. Decentralized, over-collateralized with collaterals ACA, DOT, and liquid representations of DOT token, it has the main qualities to get that spot.
The parachains, which integrated aUSD recently are Astar Network, Basilisk (canary of HydraDX), and Amplitude (canary of Pendulum). aUSD has already been integrated also to the biggest EVM-based parachain Moonbeam as xcaUSD.
Acala also recently introduced the Interprotocol aUSD Distribution Scheme (IADS), a novel approach to add liquidity to protocols such as Taiga via the aUSD protocol. IADS will generate aUSD for deposit into the Taiga 3-pool to improve liquidity efficiency and help the aUSD peg.
6. Zenlink is live on Astar Network
Zenlink, the cross-chain DEX running on Polkadot and Kusama, finally supports Astar Network. The official launch was on July 26th with farming and bootstrap available to the community from that time.
Zenlink offers the first 4 trading pairs, which you can farm as well. Astar treasury has provided 1.2M ASTR to incentivize incoming liquidity providers.
There are available those liquidity pools to this moment:
- 4pool consisting USDC+BUSD+BAI+DAI with APR ~27%
- ASTR-USDC LP with APR ~53%
- ASTR-DOT LP with APR ~58%
- ASTR-ZKL LP with APR ~68%
By using Celer cBridge, users can now easily transfer ZKL between Astar, Moonbeam, and other parachains.
7. Polkadot has the smallest carbon footprint among PoS blockchains according to CCRI study
While Bitcoin is challenged by its high energy consumption, Proof-of-stake blockchains have the energy consumption significantly lower.
According to this Bloomberg article, the team of the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute made a research study, where they compared the six most capitalized PoS blockchains — Polkadot, Cardano, Solana, Avalanche, Tezos, and Algorand. The study was commissioned by Ava Labs, which is associated with the Avalanche blockchain.
The results of this research study were that Polkadot has the lowest total electricity consumption and total carbon emissions per year. On the other hand, Cardano uses the lowest energy per node per year and Solana uses the lowest electricity per transaction.
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