Polkadot History — The First Five Parachains
Polkadot rolled out the last part of its launch on November 11th, 2021. That is, the parachain auctions were released! Each auction was to last for seven days, have a two day cool-down period, then the next auction would begin. When the first auction opened up, 12 different crowdloans started and thus people started locking up their DOT for two years. Of the 12 contestants only five would actually become parachains, so who won? Let’s begin!
Acala -
The first parachain auction winner was Acala, the “DeFi hub of Polkadot”. Acala is an Ethereum compatible financial platform that enables anyone to use smart contracts or built in protocols with out of the box cross chain capabilities. Other products they offer are liquid staking, liquidity pools, and a hybrid finance service which joins traditional banking with decentralized applications thanks to Current Banking. Soon you will be able to stake your Acala and earn rewards for helping decentralize the network! If you would like to learn more about Acala, click here!
Moonbeam -
The next parachain winner, number two, is Moonbeam! Moonbeam by Purestake is a smart contracts platform built with Substrate that launched on the Polkadot network. It allows developers to build natively interoperable applications on the Polkadot ecosystem. One big advantage that Moonbeam brings is the fact that developers can easily port over their projects from Ethereum and adapt it to be compatible with Moonbeam and therefore Polkadot. Since Moonbeams launch, it’s already live on 3 dexs and many more projects are eagerly waiting to launch. This is good news and is just one of the many reasons that the Polkadot community is growing so rapidly. Click here to learn more about Moonbeam!
Astar —
The third parachain winner is Astar! Astar is a multi-chain decentralized application layer on Polkadot. It will support various DApps for DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs once its fully launched. What makes Astar truly shine is that it can bring a more diverse set of developers to Substrate since it is a parachain that offers smart contracts in WebAssembly. This is especially important because the Polkadot relay chain does not natively support smart contracts. If you’d like to learn more about Astar, click here.
Parallel Finance —
Up next, the winner of the fourth parachain auction, Parallel Finance! This parachain offers the first money market protocol on Polkadot. In doing so, they are able to offer services like staking and derivatives protocols, as well as providing other projects running for parachains a collateralized lending market to help secure the auctions. Parallel Finance has provided extra value by increasing rewards to incentivize users to use their ecosystem, and it’s working well! Click here to learn more!
Clover Finance —
Lastly, the winner of parachain number five is Clover Finance. They offer a blockchain infrastructure platform built with Substrate that focuses on cross-chain compatibility for DeFi applications. Clover Finance originally launched on Ethereum and they hope / plan to bridge the two chains seamlessly, as well as to remove gas fees for end users. Click here to learn more about Clover Finance.
A unique aspect of the parachains that is important to note, is that people that participated in the auctions were rewarded. In other words, if you contributed DOT to an auction and that contestant ultimately won the parachain then your DOT was locked up for two years but you got rewarded for it. Most parachain winners offered a set amount of their token for every so many DOT. For example, Clover Finance offered 20 CLV (Clover Finance’s token) for every DOT. This made getting into Polkadot parachain auctions a very good investment opportunity. In total, 99,192,788 DOT were raised for the first five parachain auctions. If that doesn’t show you how many people are backing DOT then I don’t know what will.
