Astar Network (formerly known as Plasm Network) has won the third Polkadot parachain slot in last week’s parachain auction. The multichain smart contract hub supporting Ethereum VM, WebAssembly, and Layer 2 raised over 10 million DOT, worth $274 million at corresponding market rates.
Key takeaways:
- Astar Network, a Japan-based blockchain firm focused on creating scalability solutions, has secured the third parachain slot on the Polkadot platform thanks to 27,100 contributors participating in the auction.
- Sota Watanabe, the founder of Astar Network, spoke with Forkast.News: “This is a huge step for the entire Astar ecosystem, since we have been developing the network for more than 2.5 years to become a Polkadot parachain.”
- Astar joins the previous two auction winners, DeFi hub Acala with 32.5M DOT contributed, and multi-chain protocol Moonbeam with 35.8M DOT contributed. Astar will be onboarded onto a Polkadot parachain on December 17, along with the other first five auction winners.
- Each parachain auction winner will be able to build on the Polkadot network for the duration of 96 weeks (22 months).
- Parachains are customized blockchains designed to feed into the mainchain. The project-specific design allows them to achieve higher throughput while retaining lower transaction costs than the main blockchain. Parachains were first introduced in Polkadot’s white paper and later incorporated into its canary network Kusama.
- The next two parachain auction winners will be announced prior to December 17.
