Keep An Eye Out For These 5 Promising Projects In Upcoming Polkadot Parachain Slot Auctions

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As Polkadot inches closer to the real-world launch of its multi-chain network, Polkadot’s native token, DOT, is on an upward trajectory. Following the recent announcement by the Polkadot team, prices of DOT crossed USD 45 for the first time in five months.

Parachains are one of the most integral parts of the Polkadot ecosystem. Hence, the team revealing the schedule for the highly anticipated Polkadot parachain slot auctions has quickly garnered mainstream attention. Moreover, Polkadot has successfully concluded two rounds of Kusama parachain auctions, where the participating projects cumulatively raised almost USD 1 billion from their respective crowdloan initiatives.

According to the announcement by Gavin Wood and Robert Hebermeier, the Polkadot auctions will follow the same pattern as that of Kusama, with five auctions in the first batch and another six in the second batch. While the dates aren’t set in stone and may change based on community voting, the Polkadot team has indicated that the auctions will most likely start on November 11, 2021 and continue until mid-March of 2022.

With several unique projects already testing and validating their features and code on Kusama, the upcoming auctions on Polkadot will certainly be a competitive event. While dozens of decentralized projects are bidding for limited slots, take a deeper look at the potential frontrunners of the upcoming auctions, especially those that have already gathered substantial community support through crowdloans.

Decentralized Projects That Will Shape The Future Of Finance

Moonbeam is probably the most dominant contender for a Polkadot parachain slot. It is a Polkadot-based smart contract-enabled parachain that offers full compatibility with Ethereum, making it easy to build natively interoperable blockchain applications. The platform aims to overcome Ethereum’s scalability, speed, and cost issues while leveraging the features of Polkadot.

Moonbeam’s sister network Moonriver is currently dominating the Polkadot ecosystem. Ever since the project won a slot in the second Kusama auction by raising 205,935 KSM from more than 10,000 community members, the number of decentralized projects lining up to build on Moonriver has increased substantially. As of now, a consortium of decentralized projects covering decentralized exchanges, oracles, NFT platforms, crypto betting/gambling platforms, liquidity protocols, and decentralized marketplaces have joined the Moonriver ecosystem, bringing the total locked value (TVL) to more than USD 90 million.

Acala, the multi-chain DeFi liquidity hub of Polkadot, is another valuable project that can win a slot in the first batch. This layer-1 smart contract platform is highly scalable and compatible with Ethereum. It also offers built-in liquidity and ready-made financial applications alongside interoperable cross-chain functionality and enterprise-grade security protocols. Acala has also partnered with Blockdaemon to introduce the first liquid staking derivatives for DOT and KSM, heralding a new era of hybrid financial (HyFi) products on Polkadot.

Other than this, Acala’s sister network Karura won the first parachain slot in the Kusama parachain slot auctions, raising more than US$100 million in KSM tokens from a total of 20,779 global community members. Acala is also the first decentralized financial company to offer a stablecoin (aUSD) for setting the foundation of Polkadot DeFi.

Another futuristic project, Manta Network, the Polkadot-based plug-and-play privacy-preservation protocol for DeFi, has emerged as a potential contender with high chances of securing a slot in the first batch of auctions. Manta Network is built on Substrate and offers decentralized privacy protocols for payments, token exchange, lending, and synthetic assets.

Using zk-SNARKS, Manta Network ensures end-to-end anonymity, thus solving several inherent issues with DeFi, including scalability, privacy, liquidity, interoperability, and usability. Accordingly, the project has the backing of several prominent industry leaders and investment firms such as CoinFund, ParaFi Capita, SkyVision Capital, LongHash Ventures, and many more. Other than this, Manta Network’s testnet Calamari Network is already live on the Kusama parachain. During the second batch of Kusama parachain slot auctions, it secured the second round slot, raising more than 218,000 KSM from 19,766 community members.

DeFi needs to expand if it wants to enter the mainstream financial market. To make that happen, Centrifuge, a decentralized protocol that bridges the gap between real-world assets and DeFi, has developed a promising solution that unlocks liquidity for real-world assets.

By allowing anyone to tokenize their real-world assets like invoices, royalties, and real estate, Centrifuge enables lenders and borrowers to connect without any centralized authorities. The platform allows for borrowers to access financing by using their tokenized assets as collateral via its asset-backed lending dApp Tinlake.

Following its successful bid for the ninth parachain slot, Centrifuge’s testnet Altair debuted on Kusama. Altair raised more than 187,000 KSM from 18,342 community members, underlining its broad support.

Meanwhile, answering the calls for a more creator-centric social media paradigm is Subsocial. Against the backdrop of increasing social media scrutiny and censorship concerns, Subsocial aims to rebalance the relationship between creators and communities by helping users construct their own social platforms and marketplaces.

Besides empowering creators to harness the full value of their work, users of these networks aren’t the product. Unlike traditional social media where advertising and data collection form the basis for monetization, creators on Subsocial command the power to sell access via subscriptions or collect via community tipping. Since launching the betanet in 2020 and Sub.ID in August to help users visualize their entire Substrate portfolios, Subsocial’s betanet chain now features balances in over 12,000 accounts, expressing the community’s substantial growth.

Finally, KILT Protocol is another promising solution to keep an eye out for. By design, KILT is an open-source protocol for issuing verifiable credentials for Web3 applications that are claim-based, revocable, and anonymous. KILT helps end-users claim different attributes stored in certificate form on the blockchain that trusted entities can attest.

Thanks to its strong community support and valuable use cases, KILT obtained the sixth slot in the Kusama parachain auctions by raising over 200,000 KSM from more than 12,000 community members. Since then, the platform has grown in popularity and has established itself as the go-to solution for decentralized identities and verifiable credentials for all projects within the Polkadot ecosystem.