Astar Network won Polkadot’s third parachain slot auction today. Polkadot will launch Astar Network and four other parachains on its platform on Dec. 17.
Fast facts
- “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,” said Sota Watanabe, founder of Astar Network. Watanabe told Forkast.News that after the soft-launch in December, Astar Network’s main features will be enabled in January and the entire Polkadot ecosystem and Astar is expected to become a crucial part of Web 3.0.
- Polkadot’s parachain auction is an auction system where investors can cast votes by staking in Polkadot (DOT) — the project with the most deposits wins the auction and becomes a part of the parachain. Astar has gathered over 10.3 million DOTs from 27,100 contributions as the auction closed today.
- Polkadot, which was created by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, is a blockchain protocol designed to connect parallelized blockchains, or parachains, into a secure multi-chain network named Polkadot relay chain. The relay chain can only carry a limited number of parachains, which is why the parachain slot auction is highly coveted.
- Astar Network, formerly Plasm Network, is a Polkadot dApp hub from Japan that supports Ethereum Virtual Machine, WebAssembly, dApp staking and layer 2 solutions.
- DeFi project Acala and decentralized smart contract platform Moonbeam won the first two slots in the Polkadot parachain. After Astar, only two spots are left before Dec. 17, when the five parachains will be launched on the Polkadot platform.