Acala

mission

To bring more financial accessibility, opportunity, and prosperity to everyone on the planet through a new, open financial system.

current challenges

Transaction fees

This is a major hurdle for newcomers to decentralized finance (DeFi). For example, they may want to convert fiat to stablecoins and use them to participate in DeFi protocols. his involves a lot more work and brings them unwanted exposure to the crypto market.

Oracles

Oracle operators fetch external data and feed them back to the blockchain. However, there are few major issues with existing oracle solutions on current major DeFi platforms. 

Solidity development

Many existing DeFi protocols are implemented in Solidity, which has a large developer community. This imposes a challenge to any DeFi platforms that do not support EVM & Solidity as a lot of effort is required to onboard developers and existing EVM & Solidity tools and libraries cannot be reused.

culture & values

The community we’re building is shaped by our values and fuelled by the needs of all humans:

• Inclusion, Care, Trust, and Respect
• Empowerment
• Guidance and Support
• Friendship, Community, Real Relationships 

history

Acala was founded by the Acala Foundation, a collaboration by two Polkadot development groups, Laminar and Polkawallet. The Foundation aimed to create decentralized financial markets across blockchains connected by Polkadot's Relay Chain. TAcala has focused on financial applications but is also working on interoperability initiatives and opening development capabilities to broaden its ecosystem and reach. 

The Web3 Foundation awarded Acala a development grant to begin building in 2019. The Web3 Foundation awards grants to projects that develop open-source decentralized applications (dApps) that plug into and contribute to the Polkadot ecosystem. According to the Web3 Foundation, Acala's stablecoin system, liquidity staking platform, and decentralized exchange would be the foundation of DeFi activity within the Polkadot ecosystem.

Since 2019, Acala has generated some extra funding and secured a few private investment rounds. The Web3 Foundation awarded two additional grants to Acala after their initial 2019 award. Crypto investment firms Polychain Capital and Pantera Capital respectively led Acala's Seed and Series A fundraising rounds. These private rounds raised over $8 million from 20 investment groups by August 2020.

core team

Bette Chen - Co-Founder

Bryan Chen - Co-Founder

0xThreeBody - Co-Founder

Ruitao Su - Co-Founder

Dan Reece - Chief Growth Officer 

benefits

While some startups might turn to private venture capital rounds to fund their launch and initial years of operation, Acala has instead chosen to incorporate the Crowdloan model to ensure a widespread, fair, and ethical distribution of its network ownership. By participating in the Crowdloan, supporters will receive Acala tokens (ACA), representing their share of the network.