Key takeaways:
- The first batch of parachains went live on December 18, five years since originally being outlined in Polkadot’s whitepaper
- Acala, Moonbeam, Parallel Finance, Astar, and Clover Finance raised the most DOT during crowdloans and secured a parachain lease that will last 96 weeks
- Altogether, more than 113 million DOT have been contributed during the first five auction periods
Five years since first being outlined in the Polkadot’s whitepaper, the highly anticipated parachains have finally gone live on Saturday. Five blockchain projects, including Acala, Moonbeam, Parallel Finance, Astar, and Clover Finance have been deployed to their respective parachains in the morning hours of December 18.
More than 113 million DOT, worth over $2.7 billion, have been contributed in crowdloans
The parachain onboarding process was designed to benefit projects that enjoy strong community support – users were able to contribute their DOT tokens during auction crowdloan periods and improve the chances of their preferred projects securing a parachain slot.
The projects that raised the most funds and won a parachain auction earned a Polkadot sidechain lease for a period of 96 weeks. DOT holdings that have been contributed throughout the crowdloan period, along with project-specific rewards, will be distributed to participants in nine reward sessions that will span the whole duration of the parachain lease.
Parachains, also called side chains, are customized blockchains designed to feed into the Polkadot Relay Chain. The project-specific design lets them attain higher throughput while maintaining lower transaction costs.
The Polkadot team wrote about the historic event for the ecosystem in a blog post:
“The Polkadot Paper outlined Polkadot’s core features and sketched out the network’s sharded multichain design. Parachains are the final piece of core functionality, as outlined in the paper, to be fully launched. How Polkadot evolves from here is up to its community of DOT holders, who will approve any future upgrades via the network’s on-chain governance system.”
The first batch of auctions awarded 5 parachain slots. Moonbeam managed to raise the most funds during the auction period – 35.7 million DOT were raised and a total of 48,346 contributions have been made. DeFi hub Acala raised 32.5 million DOT, while the third most funds were raised by Parallel Finance, with 10.7 million DOT contributed. In total, projects raised 113.3 million DOT, worth roughly $2.7 billion.
The second batch of six Polkadot auctions will commence on December 23 and last until March 10, 2022.
