A decentralised finance hub founded by two Kiwis has taken an early lead in Polkadot‘s highly anticipated crowdloan auctions.
Acala Network has raised 8 million DOT tokens (about US$421 million) from over 50,000 contributors in just three days, according to Acala VP of growth Dan Reecer.
The next leading project, Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible network Moonbeam, has raised 4.7 million DOT tokens (US$247 million) since that project began accepting contributions late Friday night (Sydney time), according to Parachains.info.
DApp hub Astar Network (formerly Plasma) is a distant third, with 756,155 DOT tokens contributed.
Stockhead published a detailed explainer on the Polkadot parachain auctions on Sunday, but in a nutshell, these projects are competing for a spot in Polkadot’s 100-slot parachain network, an interconnected network of diverse crypto platforms.
Five slots are up for auction in the first round of weekly auctions, which begin on Thursday and run consecutively through mid-December.
Participants are loaning their DOT tokens to the various competing projects for two years, in return for an allocation of each project’s native token.
Singapore-based Digital Finance Group announced that over the weekend it would be supporting Acala with a 500,000 DOT (US$26.3 million) contribution.
“Acala is the financial doorway for Polkadot and we are proud to support such a revolutionary project, serving the growing demand for Web 3.0’s financial hub,” said founder and chief executive James Wo.
Acala was founded in October 2019 by Aucklanders Bette Chen and Ruitao Su, and is being developed by a distributed team based in NZ, China, Europe, Brazil, and the United States.
Kurara Network, Acala’s deployment on Polkadot’s sister network Kusama, won the first parachain auction on that platform in June.
For more on Acala, check out this episode of Stockhead’s Crypto Frontier podcast from last month.