Acala’s $250 million ecosystem fund is being established to expedite the development of decentralised applications (DApp) on Polkadot that use its stablecoin, Acala USD (aUSD). Polkadot is a network of interoperability that links a number of application-specific blockchains known as parachains.
The $250 mil fund was backed by a number of prominent cryptocurrency investors such as Arrington Capital, Alameda Research, Digital Currency Group, Jump Crypto, IOSG, Kraken Ventures, and Pantera Capital.
According to its press release, the fund will award grants to early-stage Polkadot projects in such areas as decentralised finance (Defi), derivatives, payments, and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) that use aUSD stablecoin.
Building the Polkadot’s native, decentralised stablecoin has been the focus of Acala’s work for several years. According to Acala co-founder Bette Chen, the parachain and the fun will come together to accelerate the cross-chain ecosystem whose foundational building block is aUSD.
aUSD: Polkadot’s native decentralised stablecoin. Source: Medium.com/Acalanetwork
The eligible projects of the fund are early-stage start-ups based on Polkadot with a significant emphasis on the utility and growth of aUSD. Acala Network also identified the parachain protocols that facilitated the aUSD adoption fund as Astar Network, Centrifuge, Efinity, HydraDX, Manta, Moonbeam, OriginTrail, Parallel, and Zeitgeist.
Acala’s Defi solutions are built upon the aUSD stablecoin. It may be created employing collateral tokens such as Polkadot (DOT), Kusama (KSM), Acala (ACA), or Karura (KAR) on Polkadot and then staked for yield.