Polkadot — Astar dApp Overview
Astar, formerly known as Plasm, won the third Polkadot parachain auction and therefore currently occupies slot number four from December 17th, 2021 — October 20th, 2023. They raised a total of 10,333,552 DOT during their crowdloan.
What Is Astar?
Astar is what is called a Substrate Runtime Module Library. Without getting too technical, this is what enables developers to add Astar functions to their chain. The advantages of this is that Astar is very scalable so it offers many benefits while being easy to do. If you’d like to learn more about the technicals of Astar click here.
What Is dApp Staking?
dApp staking is the primary function of the Astar dApp, so it is important to understand exactly what is going on and how the system works. As seen in the info-graphic above, Astar works backwards from their valuation and breaks the inflation off as each step is taken. The most important points to take away from this is that more and more dApps are being made on Astar and that you are staking to a project instead of a validator.
Astar dApp Overview
When you first connect your wallet to the Astar dApp you are greeted with this screen. It shows you an overview of your balances and allows you to transfer $ASTR or even access the faucet.
If you click on “dApp Staking”, then you can see the “Discover” page. Here, you can see all of the current dApps you can stake your $ASTR coins into. You can also see the current APR.
If you find a project you’d like to stake to, you can do so by clicking “Stake”. Keep in mind that each project can only have a total of 512 stakers with a minimum of 500 $ASTR each.
