With Polkadot’s launch of parachains, the potential to incorporate other blockchain elements into their main ecosystem has become a working reality. With this development, more and more innovative projects are flocking to the Polkadot ecosystem.
In this article, we’ll be discussing the crowdloan feature, demonstrating how projects become part of the parachain Polkadot ecosystem. We’ll also be touching on three projects that have currently picked up steam within the Polkadot ecosystem. Let’s get right into it.
Crowdloan on the Polkadot Ecosystem
The Polkadot apps page provides an easy way for users to interact with new projects that have made their way onto the Polkadot ecosystem. You can see all the recent events on this page. Additionally, you can click on parachains to see all of the parachains and parathreads that are currently onboarding to the platform.
You’ll also be able to see all of the current crowdloans that are running on the Polkadot ecosystem. This page will give you current updates about how much the project has raised and how much you have contributed to the loan. There will be a range of minimum DOT contributions, as well as displaying how much remains till the project hits the cap.
Within this new feature, the community can directly support a range of projects that they find interesting, loaning the project DOT to speed up its development. Many of the largest and most talked-about projects on the Polkadot ecosystem have risen through this crowdloan program.
The multiple different chains that Polkadot supports make it a sharded system. This means that the ecosystem is split up into multiple sub-blockchains, each one named a different parachain. When proposing a crowdloan, developers will aim to launch into a different parachain, with the actual use of that chain being specialized.
By sharding the Polkadot ecosystem, they ensure that every single sub-chain is as efficient as possible, being created specifically for that functionality. This allows new and exciting projects to launch and run efficiently on the Polkadot ecosystem.
Top Polkadot Projects Currently In Progress
Now we understand a little bit more about constructing a parachain and fulfilling a certain role within the Polkadot ecosystem, we can launch into three interesting projects that are currently underway.
We’ll be discussing:
- Polkadex
- Efinity
- Acala Network
Let’s break these down.
Polkadex
Built on Substrate, the platform that holds up Polkadot, Polkadex is a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency exchange. This platform caters to traders of cryptocurrency, allowing them to access high liquidity, advanced trading features, and lightning-fast transactions within the Polkadot ecosystem.
The main goal of Polkadex is to ensure that people all over the world have access to decentralized financial systems. Due to this, they’ve made their platform accessible to everyone, providing tutorials and making the interface very intuitive to use. The focus of creating an easily-navigable user interface allows anyone to trade, store, and buy crypto with ease.
The main feature that sets this project apart from others in a similar vein is the interoperability of its system. A user will be able to connect to the most popular trading bots in the world, implementing whichever strategies they’d like right from within the user interface.
Additionally, the development of a decentralized KYC option allows users to access fiat currencies in Polkadex and then store them within a decentralized KYC. This ensures user security, allowing people to store their own data within wallets, instead of directly on the Polkadex platform. When combined with the ease of buying crypto with credit cards on the fiat program, Polkadex suddenly becomes a very attractive model for crypto trading.
Combining the benefits of both decentralized and centralized trading exchanges into one comprehensive application, Polkadex is definitely a project to keep an eye on.
Efinity
Efinity, another Polkadot parachain that’s gained attention since its foundation in August 2021, aims to become the next generation go-to platform for NFTs. NFTs, which stand for Non-Fungible Tokens, are digital assets that cannot be duplicated, often running on the ERC721 token.
One major problem that is continually run into when working with NFTs is the high gas fees that Ethereum offers, reflecting the low transactions-per-minute that Ethereum can achieve. Efinity seeks to overcome this issue by using the ERC1155 token standard, which is a mix between the ERC721 and the ERC20 tokens.
The ability to generate both non-fungible and fungible tokens within one token, which is the main purpose of the ERC1155, ensures that gas fees are considerably lower than before. The high-speed trading with low fees makes Efinity an attractive platform when buying and selling NFTs.
As one of Polkadot’s parachains, this project represents an interesting avenue of pursuit that has been gaining traction in the Polkadot ecosystem.
Acala Network
Acala is a decentralized finance network, acting as a layer-one parachain smart contract platform. With both Ethereum compatibility and specific optimization for DeFi applications, it provides high scalability and can help in creating modular financial applications on Polkadot.
Alcala was actually the very first parachain to secure a position within the Polkadot ecosystem, the community using the crowdloan system to raise 32 million DOT for its development. This huge number comes from the community-backing that Polkadot has raised over recent years, with over 800,000 community supporters feeding into the global channels.
The main focus of Acala is to further develop the Polkadot ecosystem, becoming one of its central hubs of DeFi and allowing innovative financial features to launch on the platform. With cross-chain linkage to Ethereum, other developers will be able to use Acala through Polkadot in order to get the best functionalities of Ethereum, while also taking advantage of everything that the Substrate-powered Polkadot has to offer.
The diverse potential applications of Acala are why it’s certainly a project to watch.
Final Thoughts
These projects represent the power that Polkadot’s parachain ecosystem has. With new projects springing up every single day that position themselves as the answer to problems previously seen on the Ethereum ecosystem, Polkadot is an interesting ecosystem to keep an eye on over the coming months.
Polkadex, Acala, and Efinity provide additional capabilities to Polkadot that further develop this platform. Polkadex allows for users of Polkadot to exchange cryptocurrency, pulling an advanced range of features from both centralized and decentralized networks. In a similar vein, Efinity’s use of the ERC1155 token allows the platform to offer NFT trading without Ethereum’s high gas fees. Finally, Acala allows for the further construction of Polkadot’s DeFi systems, providing ingenious cross-chain links to Ethereum.
From Polkadex’s integrated cryptocurrency exchange to Efinity’s innovative approach to NFT trading, there are a range of projects currently running on Polkadot to put on your watchlist.
