Polkadot Parachain Updates: Acala & Moonbeam
The first batch of parachains have been connected to the Polkadot relay chain and they have been running smoothly for a while.
So what’s the progress of these parachains recently? Let’s have a look!
1. Acala
Acala is the first global decentralized open finance alliance. It’s the DeFi hub of Polkadot ecosystem and an Ethereum smart contract compatible platform with built-in one-stop cross-chain DeFi protocols, also including decentralized stablecoins (aUSD) , trustless liquidity derivatives, and AMM Swaps. Acala allows developers to leverage EVM+ to achieve cross-chain, chain-level innovation.
So what happened after Acala winning Polkadot’s first parachain slot?
Operational Updates
After Acala became a Polkadot Parachain, a lot of projects announced to participate in Acala ecosystem.
On January 20th, AquaDAO was launched, It was the first DAO community in the Acala ecosystem. AquaDAO develops the Acala Treasury by adjusting reserves and asset portfolios and allows ACA holders to enjoy sustainable network value.
On January 25th, ACA enabled the transfer function.
On February 8th, Acala enabled the one-directional DOT bridge, giving DOT the utility in the Acala protocol, and the ability to flow and earn in the Layer-1 network.
On February 9th, Capx announced to build on Acala EVM+ environment and would launch its Capx Liquid, Capx Exchange, and Capx Lend products on Acala.
On February 10th, the Acala network launched the first Polkadot decentralized native cross-chain stable coin — aUSD, which supports staking of DOT and its derivative LDOT.
On February 10th, Acala launched the Million ACA Rewards Program, allocating 1 million ACA to different asset pools on Acala Swap over the next six months.
On February 11th, InDexZoo announced to build on Acala EVM+, bringing their index and leveraged token design to the Polkadot ecosystem. It Provides users with long, short, and leveraged exposure to any basket of crypto assets.
On February 15th, Acala enabled the liquidity bootstrap of ACA/slash aUSD, which is the first asset pair of ACA on Acala Swap. The bootstrap program will start with 100,000 ACA liquidity incentives at the first mouth
On February 18th, Acala announced GameDAO will be joining the Acala ecosystem. GameDAO is set to bring its community-owned operating system for ‘fundraising, videogame ownership, metaverses, e-sports, and the creative industry to Acala developers and users, leveraging the Acala blockchain and aUSD stablecoin.
On February 18th, the exchange Kucoin enabled the DOT Deposit & withdrawal function on the Acala Chain. That means the Polkadot & Acala community can use Acala one-way bridge to transfer their DOT in Acala and transfer their DOT out by Kucoin.
Technical Updates
Acala Mainnet:
- Reconstruction and optimization of CDP Engine to prepare for the upgrade of stablecoin protocols in the future;
- Cross-chain state oracle module is added as the underlying module of more cross-chain protocols;
- Support for pausing and restarting the processing of XCM messages
Acala UI:
- Redesigning minting interface for LKSM/LDOT, and Bootstrap interface for Swap
Acala EVM+:
- Ready to launch EVM module for Karura and support new features of Ethereum’s latest London hard fork
2. Moonbeam
Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on the Polkadot network that makes it easy to build natively interoperable applications.
After winning Polkadot’s second parachain slot, Moonbeam completed its launch process on Polkadot on January 11, 2022, and has been live for 6 weeks. As one of the most active parachains in the Polkadot ecosystem, Moonbeam has an excellent performance in both ecosystem development and technical updates.
Operational side
Integrations with commonly-used developer tools help development teams to successfully deploy on Moonbeam, and complete the first step to entering the Polkadot ecosystem. Remix, OpenZeppelin, HardHat, Truffle, Waffle, Mars, Gnosis Safe, MetaMask and other mainstream Ethereum developer tools are available on Moonbeam.
Among APIs and basic tools, The Graph, BwareLabs, Onfinality, Biconomy, Covalent, Subquery, DIA, and MathWallet have been integrated with Moonbeam, allowing smart contract developers to easily develop and deploy their projects with a diversity of fundamental tools according to their needs.
DeFi projects on Moonbeam now cover various segments, for example, Zenlink, an underlying cross-chain DEX protocol built on Polkadot, AMM DEXs such as Solarflare and Convergence attracted the first batch of Polkadot users on Moonbeam. What’s more, one of the top projects on Ethereum, Curve, launched its product on Moonbeam, introducing more assets into the Polkadot ecosystem.
Multiple cross-chain bridges are the key to support multi-chain assets on Moonbeam. For example, Nomad, Axelar, Multichain, Connext and other bridges have established close cooperation with DApps in the Moonbeam ecosystem, capturing more value for cross-chain assets for the Polkadot ecosystem via decentralized interoperation.
Moonbeam has a variety of on-chain analytics tools, such as collator data analysis platform Web3 Go, DApp listing platform DappRadar and blockchain browsers Etherscan (Moonscan.io), Subscan, and Blockscout display Moonbeam on-chain data in real-time.
In addition, gamefi project Ig’nite Tournament, DAO infrastructure tool SubDAO, well-known Ethereum projects Lido and Sushi will be deployed on Moonbeam in the near future.
Technical Updates
On February 11, 2022, Moonbeam released the latest runtime 1201 upgrade to Moonriver, and the Moonbeam network also completed the deployment of this upgrade.
The runtime 1201 release includes several important changes:
● Enables XCM on Moonbeam (in anticipation of Polkadot support is being enabled)
● Introduction of the Democracy precompile on Moonriver, which will enable network participants to vote using MetaMask
● Fee payment and changes to base fee handling based on EIP-1559
The Moonbeam 1200 runtime upgrade adds support for the following EIPs (all part of the London hard fork)
EIP-1559 — a new transaction pricing mechanism
EIP-3198 — BASEFEE opcode, which gives the EVM access to the block’s base fee
EIP-3529 — reduction in refunds when clearing storage
EIP-3541 — reject new contracts starting with 0xEF byte
There were also some changes to the parachain staking pallet (parachainStaking). These changes needed to be done mainly to reduce the size of the CandidateState, and therefore, the size of the Proof-of-Validity (PoV) to ensure the stable running of parachain. The bottom delegations refer to those who are out of the active delegation set. It maxes out at 50 bottom delegators per candidate. If all bottom delegations are filled, a new delegation will kick the lowest bottom delegator (in terms of stake) out of the set, revoking the delegation instantly.
XCM will be launched soon after the relay chain feature is enabled. Since then, there are more than 8000 KSM and 390000 RMRK on Moonriver as xcKSM and xcRMRK. These XC-20 assets can benefit from Kusama’s interoperability while enjoying a familiar ERC-20 interface on Moonriver, so they can be easily integrated into EVM dApps, therefore improving the asset utilization efficiency.
AuthorMapping precompile — this precompiled contract is the missing piece for collators to be able to do all the necessary actions through the Ethereum API. This means that collators could host their candidate account in a Ledger/Trezor device. Available in all Moonbeam-based networks.
Summary
That’s some Updates of Acala and Moonbeam. I believe that everyone is looking forward to the realization of the original vision of these parachains, but Rome is not built in a day, it takes time to experience and grow, I believe that in the near future we will see a Web 3 ecosystem that will surprise everyone!
In next week’s article, we will talk about the updates of other parachains including Astar and Clover.
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