Digital Finance Group (DFG) has announced that it has allocated 300,000 DOT, which at today’s price is equivalent to $12.8 million, to Astar Network,
DFG, the cryptocurrency investment company run by James Wo revealed that the allocation to Astar Network, a DApp hub on Polkadot that aims to be a multi-chain smart contract platform, will support multiple blockchains and virtual machines.
The first-ever parachain auction on the Polkadot ecosystem is ongoing and it is currently on its 5th day with Acala leading the auction with 30.8 million DOT ($1.31 billion) raised so far, as of the time of this writing. Moonbeam comes in at close second with 30.7 million DOT ($1.3 billion) and third, we have Astar with 6.6 million DOT ($281.4 million) raised so far.
What you should know
Astar Network, previously known as Plasm, is competing in the parachain slot auction to build a decentralized application hub on Polkadot that supports Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Web Assembly-based smart contracts.
DFG made its investment into the project through the Bifrost’s Slot Auction Liquidity Protocol (SALP), which allows users to participate in parachain auctions held on both Polkadot and Kusama.
Bifrost’s SALP platform allows users to contribute to a wide range of parachain auctions, while also providing participants with liquid staking derivatives representing their underlying DOT contributions.
The first auction will end on the 18th of November 2021 and the winner will be decided by the Dutch candle method, with the precise moment of the auction’s close determined retroactively at the end of the bidding period.
The projects that win Polkadot’s first five parachain slots will go live on December 17 and will hold the slot until their lease period ends.
What they are saying
James Wo, DFG Founder and CEO, shared his thoughts on why the investment firm firmly believes in the solutions being created by the Astar team. He stated, “Since we began investing in Polkadot and the Polkadot ecosystem, we have thought that interoperability is one of this protocol’s key strengths. Aside from a very strong team, Astar addresses a critical interoperability issue and bridges Polkadot with Ethereum, which will bring a great number of experienced teams to this ecosystem.
“Additionally, Astar has been consistently proving the quality of its products and delivered over-the-top results in preliminary settings. We believe Astars scalability, compatibility, and governance features will continue to make it stand out and be among the top winners of the upcoming Parachain Auctions.”
Sota Watanabe, Founder of Astar, referred to the DFG contribution as, “Another brick laid by an important contributor to Astar and the Polkadot ecosystem, that will become the base for a fully connected and interoperable universe of blockchains once the parachain slot that we are working towards, is achieved.”
This will mean that DFG has invested a total of 800,000 DOT tokens for the parachain auctions, as it invested 500,000 DOT tokens to Acala, an all-in-one decentralized finance network.
DOT currently trades $42.52, down over 9% as of the time of this writing.
