Stake Technologies Raises $10M For Polkadot, Kusama Auctions
- The $10 million investment will help Stake Technologies win slots in the upcoming Parachain Lease Offering for Kusama and Polkadot.
- If it secures itself a spot, Stake will bring a smart contract development layer to the Polkadot network, which is interoperable with Ethereum.
Shutterstock
The firm behind the Plasm and Shiden networks, Stake Technologies Inc., has raised $10 million in a strategic funding round led by Fenbushi Capital, Stake said in a blog post on 11 June.
According to the announcement, the investment will help Stake build out the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems through its wholly owned Plasm and Shiden networks. Led by Fenbushi Capital, the funding round saw participation from angel investor Nobuyuki Idei, ex-CEO of Sony, as well as from venture capital (VC) firms such as Hypersphere Ventures, Gumi Cryptos, IOSG Ventures, TRG Capital, AU21 Capital and others.
The newly acquired funds will be used to help Stake win slots in the upcoming Parachain Lease Offering (PLO) for Kusama and Polkadot, with Plasm being dedicated to Polkadot and Shiden to Kusama. The two networks, Plasm and Shiden, will bring smart contract development layer to the Polkadot and Kusama, which is interoperable with Ethereum, DeFi and NFT DApps, and various layer 2 scaling solutions. Jack Platts, partner at Hypersphere Ventures, said in a statement:
“The multi-blockchain approach means that Plasm and Shiden will be key contributions to the overall parachain ecosystem, with their work on scaling benefiting every other future parachain.”
Projects have two ways to participate in the parachain auctions, one being direct sales and the other crowdloan. Stake Technologies has decided to take a “crowdloan-centric strategy”, where token holders loan their DOT or KSM tokens to be used as collateral for the parachain lease. Once the parachain lease period is over — which can take between six months and two years — the loaned tokens are returned to their original owners.
- All three phases of Acala’s plan to resume operations have been executed, and all services on the network are now reopened.
- All aUSD from the error mints had been recovered with the exception of 5.8 million tokens, which were re-collateralized using the team’s own funds.
Shutterstock
- One of the reasons behind SubQuery’s choice was that Acala would soon offer EVM compatibility, extending the reach of its upcoming token generation event.
- With the goal of becoming Polkadot’s DeFi hub, Acala became the first to win a parachain auction for the network.
- SubQuery aims to expand access to blockchain data on Polkadot and Kusama by creating new markets for data indexing and provisioning.
- The funds from the Series A round will help SubQuery build the first data aggregation layer for the Polkadot ecosystem.