Moonbeam Wins Second Parachain Auction Slot on Polkadot

Moonbeam, an emerging protocol that prides itself as one of the most powerful Ethereum-compatible smart contracts on the Polkadot blockchain, has won the second parachain auction slot, riding on the wings of over 200,000 of its diverse community.

The keenly contested auction ended in the protocol’s favour after it secured a total of 35 million DOT (approximately $1.4 billion) from the participating community members.

The Polkadot blockchain is building its capability to host parachains or sub-smart contracts that can foster robust interoperability and transfer assets across the board. With five parachains billed to be floated in December, the Moonbeam success in the auctions trails that of Acala which Blockchain.News reported made the first breakthrough last week.

“Moonbeam has set a new precedent for crowdloans, receiving the largest total contribution from the most contributors by far,” the Moonbeam Foundation said in the official announcement. “Over 200,000 participants contributed DOT to the crowdloan across all sources, including the Moonbeam Foundation DApp, supporting exchanges, wallets, and liquid staking providers. The average contribution was approximately 170 DOT per participant, indicative of the broad participation from Moonbeam’s global community.”

At present, more than 95 million DOT tokens, approximately $3.8 billion, have been locked in crowdloans for parachain projects across the ecosystem. There are three more protocols in the running to win a slot as part of the parachains on Polkadot. Based on the total contributions in each protocol, according to data from Parachains.info, Parallel Finance, Astar, and Clover Finance are the most favoured to win the auctions at the time.

While the contributed DOT tokens are billed to be locked for the duration in which the parachain slot will be leased, participants are billed to be incentivized adequately for their support. The Moonbean Foundation said its rewards now account for 15% of its total GLMR token supply.

Polkadot Developers Gains Access to Chainlink Oracle Through Moonbeam Integration

Thanks to the latest integration of Chainlink oracle into the Moonbeam smart contract platform, developers in the broader Polkadot ecosystem can now access reliable price feeds as they seek to build functional DApps. 

While the access to Chainlink oracles was first introduced into Moonbeam back in December last year, the access was to permit the parachain’s developers to access the needed data through the Chainlink oracle resident on Polkadot. The latest integration is a more direct linkup and is projected to expand the activities on the Moonbeam network.

“Price Feeds complete a critical component of Moonbeam’s developer infrastructure, and that’s something that will lead to the development of future DeFi products,” Niki Ariyasinghe, global head of partnerships at Chainlink Labs, said in a message.

Chainlink Oracles helps developers within a blockchain ecosystem work with external data from a particular protocol, helping to create applications based on data integrity. Considering how vital their roles are in the industry, stakeholders within the Moonbeam community had been requesting that Chainlink oracle be integrated for quite some time as confirmed by Derek Yoo, founder of the Moonbeam Network.

“Chainlink was a top requested feature from our community, and with the integration in place, friction is further reduced for developers building DeFi and other use cases,” Yoo said, noting that Chainlink is a “reliable oracle service.”

The Moonbean Network came on as the second winner of the parachain auction slot to build on the Polkadot blockchain back in November last year. Like the other winners including the Astar Network and Acala amongst others, Moonbeam is interoperable with the main Polkadot block known as the Relay Chain as well as the other parachains.

This interoperability will easily aid the integrated Chainlink Oracle to feed every developer in the Polkadot ecosystem, helping them to create new solutions across the board.

Polkadot Reports Q3 Growth: New Parachains, Staking Metrics, and Technical Upgrades

Polkadot’s ecosystem saw significant expansion in Q3 2023, with the addition of five new parachains, a rise in staking metrics, and major technical upgrades. The total volume of staked DOT increased to 663 million, and the platform recorded more than 190 million on-chain events. The quarter also saw the introduction of native USDC and a 20% quarter-on-quarter rise in XCM messages.

Staking and Metrics

Polkadot reported a quarter-on-quarter increase in the total volume of staked DOT, from 578 million to 663 million. The percentage of the total DOT supply staked is now just shy of 49%, close to the ideal staking rate of 52.5%. Nomination pools, launched in November 2022, ended the quarter with 15,281 members and more than 7 million DOT staked.

New Parachains

Five new teams acquired parachain slots, diversifying Polkadot’s Web3 use cases. The new projects include peaq, Bit.Country, InvArch, Energy Web, and Nodle. These projects focus on various sectors such as DAOs, the metaverse, IoT, and sustainable energy.

Technical Upgrades

Major proposed technical upgrades like agile coretime and asynchronous backing are nearing completion. Agile Coretime aims to provide more flexible ways for Web3 projects to access Polkadot’s computing power. Asynchronous backing could potentially increase Polkadot’s scalability eight-fold and is expected to be rolled out on the testnet Rococo soon.

Other Highlights

Native USDC was introduced, eliminating the need for bridged versions of the stablecoin.

Zodia Custody announced institutional custody and staking services on Polkadot.

A 20% quarter-on-quarter rise in XCM messages indicates increased cross-chain activity.

Polkadot is shifting towards an application-centric model, similar to cloud computing services. The upcoming technical upgrades are projected to enable support for over 1,000 parachains and 1 million transactions per second, preparing Polkadot for Web3 mass adoption.

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