The crypto market has been exploring new lows for weeks, and no one knows what it will take to reverse the trend. Despite the downtrend, cryptocurrencies within the Polkadot (DOT) ecosystem began to rebound on May 24 and have since maintained 10 to 25% gains, a sign indicating that certain market sub-sectors are on the verge of a breakout.
Here’s a look at three Polkadot ecosystem protocols whose token prices have risen recently.
Acala introduces a $250 million aUSD ecosystem fund
Acala (ACA) is the leading decentralised finance (DeF) platform on the Polkadot network, primarily because of the introduction of aUSD, the Polkadot ecosystem’s first native stablecoin.
Following the demise of Terra’s LUNA and TerraUSD (UST), traders have turned to “safer” stablecoin alternatives.
On March 23, ACA surged after the project announced the establishment of a $250 million “aUSD Ecosystem Fund” to assist early-stage startups seeking to build strong stablecoin use cases on any Polkadot or Kusama parachain.
Acala, nine parachain teams, and a group of venture funds have launched the $250 million ‘aUSD Ecosystem Fund’ 🅰️💸
The fund is seeking early-stage projects from any @Polkadot or @KusamaNetwork parachain with strong $aUSD stablecoin use cases 🚀https://t.co/OJ2V47ZUry pic.twitter.com/NDgLg2bG8N
— Acala (@AcalaNetwork) March 23, 2022
Acala also announced the launch of a kickoff rewards programme, with 1 million ACA tokens set aside as rewards for LCDOT/DOT, LCDOT/aUSD, ACA/aUSD, and aUSD/LDOT liquidity providers.
Following the announcement of the aUSD ecosystem fund, the price of ACA increased 31% from a low of $0.364 on May 23 to a daily high of $0.478 on May 24.
Astar rallies after revealing a partnership with Microsoft
The Astar (ASTR) network is a smart contract hub for the Polkadot community, supporting Ethereum (ETH), WebAssembly, and other layer-two solutions like as zk-Rollups.
Since the Polkadot relay chain doesn’t support the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM, Astar was built as a multi-chain smart contract platform capable of supporting different blockchains and virtual machines so that they can be integrated into the Polkadot ecosystem.
On May 24, AstridDAO, the Astar-based protocol responsible for minting the collateralized BAI stablecoin, announced that it had signed a partnership with Microsoft to join Microsoft for Startups, a programme “which removes traditional barriers to building a company with exclusive access to technology, coaching, marketing and support.”
Hello Astridians!
🔊 PARTNERSHIP ANNOUNCEMENT 🔊@Microsoft welcomes AstridDAO to @msft4startups program to Accelerate Growth of Decentralized Money Market and Stablecoin $BAI 🚀
Details below 🔗 👇 https://t.co/r9YO7E4NaS pic.twitter.com/J26pbrwCTU
— AstridDAO – No.1 native stablecoin on Astar (@AstridDAO) May 24, 2022
If successful, the collaboration should accelerate AstridDAO’s go-to-market speed and increase its market influence. It also comes with up to $350,000 in benefits through Github Enterprise, Microsoft Teams, and Azure credits.
Following the announcement of the partnership, the price of ASTR increased by 61%, from $0.055 to a daily high of $0.0888.
Uniswap v3 will be available on Moonbeam
Moonbeam (GLMR) is a Polkadot-based Ethereum-compatible smart contract parachain that streamlines the use of Ethereum developer tools to build or redeploy Solidity projects in a substrate-based environment.
Interoperability with the Ethereum network is a highly desired capability because the majority of decentralised applications, as well as the majority of the value in decentralised finance, currently run on Ethereum.
The benefit of EVM interoperability was demonstrated on May 24 when it was announced that a proposal to implement Uniswap (UNI) v3 on the Moonbeam network was approved, which means that the leading decentralised exchange in the crypto ecosystem will soon be available to Moonbeam users.
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Congratulations to everyone at @GnosisChain and @MoonbeamNetwork!
The proposals have passed and v3 will be deployed on both chains💫
— Uniswap Labs 🦄 (@Uniswap) May 23, 2022
Following the announcement, GLMR rose 29% from a low of $1.15 on May 23 to a daily high of $1.48 on May 24, with its 24-hour trading volume increasing 106% to $75.3 million.
