Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Acala Launch Update: Token Transfers
Recorded: Jan. 20, 2022 Duration: 0:54:00Space Recording
Full Transcription
as we were getting set up.
This is Dan Reeser and I'm joined by Betty Chen
and it's great to be here.
So big week, it's been a big few weeks
for the Polkadot ecosystem
and we've got a pretty exciting year ahead of us.
Tonight, today, depending on where you are,
we're gonna be talking through quite a bit
around the Acala launch and what's coming up on Tuesday, which is token transfers,
and then what you can expect going forward with the Acala launch, as well as something,
a bit of a surprise that Betty is going to be walking everyone through toward the end of the
talk here. Betty, do you want to introduce yourself first, and then I'm going to go ahead
and share my screen and get started yeah
sure thanks then hi everyone this is Betty co-founder of a color and calling
in from Auckland New Zealand it's exactly midday now here awesome and
Dan Reister I'm great to see everybody here I lead our growth team focusing on
marketing and business development and i'm going to be going
to be walking everyone through some slides here so let me let me share my screen and
and go ahead and go through some of these slides
All right.
all right
So I can't see my comments.
Betty, can you see the slides?
BETTY ANN BOWSER- Yep, I can see the slides.
All right.
So it was going to be the three of us.
Brian is our CTO and one of our co-founders.
And Brian is focusing on a lot of the development work right
now. So tonight it's just going to be Betty and I. Like I said, we're going to be going through
a launch update, a significant event for the community as I know a lot of people
over the past year or so have been involved in several different of our
several different community events. So we had a couple build acala events
last year we of course had the crowd loan for karura as well as acala so a lot of people
have been waiting for this moment and really excited to start getting things rolling and
rolling out our products as they get into the year like i said we're going to go through the
launch roadmap talk through what's next in the launch. And then Betty's going to go through some details around a new DAO that's going to be community led, which will allow people to stake ACA, which I know people are pretty pumped about.
But just to get started, I wanted to lay out a few statistics that we think are pretty important going into our launch and going through this launch process over the coming weeks.
We're launching an entire layer one blockchain.
So this is one of the biggest kind of trends in the industry we're seeing now with the proliferation of a lot of these different ecosystems.
And one thing to just realize is that a lot of these parachains are launching entire layer one blockchain ecosystem. So the reason why it's taking
weeks for us to roll out this blockchain is because there's a lot of different components
that go into that. As I mentioned last year, we had the crowd loan towards the end of the year,
which included the kind of contribution of a significant amount of DOT in support of Acala's crowd loan that got kind of
locked away and put in place for kind of a bid for our slot lease. And in return, a lot of people
decided to contribute using the liquid crowd loan DOT product. So because of LC DOT, a lot of people
have liquidity in the DOT that they contributed to the crowd loan. And because of that, we've got around $600 million in TVL as we speak at launch. So that's pretty exciting to us
and really I'm expecting this to grow over the coming years. Similarly, we had around 100,000
people contribute on chain and another 100,000 people contribute through exchanges to the crowd loan last year. So again, at launch, we've got well over 200,000 people that are
network owners or token holders in ACA, the kind of utility token or governance token of the
Akala network. Another thing that Betty will get into is a little bit more into the future and
where we're thinking in terms of positioning ourselves in the market and where we think Akala will play in the global financial landscape over the coming years.
As many of you know, we've been working closely with our friends in New York at Current.com.
Current is a fintech company who currently offers savings accounts to around 3 million customers in the United States.
A lot of these people are kind of newer to the financial system using Current for savings accounts.
Acala and Current have kind of paired up to build a DeFi backend to essentially bring the yields that a lot of us in the crypto world are enjoying to people in the traditional
finance world who may not know how to use things like MetaMask or public and private keys.
So this is the first of many of our integrations with the fintech world. And we're really excited
to have around 3 million customers at Current kind of waiting to begin enjoying these yields
from the crypto world as soon as we launch the product with Current.
There will be a lot more coming on Current this year,
and we definitely plan on teaming up with Current
for various presentations and conferences
over the coming year, so keep a lookout for that.
This integration with Current is really starting
to shepherd in this new category of HiFi or hybrid finance, where we're blending together the worlds of fintechs and neobanks and even traditional banks with the Web3 or crypto world.
Betty, do you want to go into a little bit more around HiFi and what we're doing in that space?
and what we're doing in that space?
Yeah, so I think it's a good time
to actually share our HiFi vision,
probably again to some of you,
to some of you, you probably know us from a distance.
So let me explain, right?
So two and a half years ago,
the team of Akala kind of chose the Substrate
and Polkadot stack.
And one of the reasons we've looked around for Cosmos,
for East2 and various different places to build.
And we had the vision of things is gonna go domain specific,
is gonna be application specific blockchain,
that will be the next wave.
And of course, this vision has since, after two years of building, and here we are,
we launched the first version of our blockchain. And then that, I guess, vision,
if you say back then, we had a lot of assumptions where things are going, because the first ways
will be a lot of generalized change. You can see copies of Ethereum going
lots of different places. But at some point, right, after those bubbles, at some point,
you got to get down to business and build something that everybody can use. And we believe
that solution is full stack, vertical integration. You see the same thing happen for Apple devices.
They own the hardware all the way to App Store and then they give you
the best experience. And then the same thing happened for Tesla cars, right? Not only they
own the hardware, the software, but also the computer chips and customize that so that they
can deliver you all the experience that you have, including self-driving. And then for us,
we're taking that same approach as full stack. So we
can customize the entire blockchain so that we can actually serve all of those customers that you
may not see today. Because all the farmers, DeFi farmers today, they are our immediate users or
early adopters, super early adopters, if you like. But ultimately, we're going to serve
folks who are next to me, having a meeting next door, they know nothing about crypto,
or just everyday people to use it. And then you need a lot of layers because I'll probably go
through a few of them. So for example, DeFi compliance is going to come inevitably.
And then when you get to that point, if you need to, by requirement,
certain part of the addresses has to be customized
and then be able to serve the compliance reasons.
If you're building inside a fixed box, which is like EVM or smart contract,
you will have no ability to do any of those.
But we are able to do it at a chain level to do those customization.
And same for settlements, right?
To get us started, some of the car companies that require settlement to be in dollars rather
than in some random native coins.
And we are able to do it.
And that's mostly because we are taking this full step approach.
And that's mostly because we are taking this full step approach.
And that's why they like us to be their partners rather than just picking any other chain.
And then the second most important thing everyone have to be aware is this upgradability because of this way that we can upgrade without forks at the lower level.
It's a future proof, right? Because today we have current and then we also have
a few others line up, right? They all have different requirements in the real world.
And then if our solution is fixed, then we cannot serve them, right? This is mostly the
layer ones that are kind of like fixed in their solution. So for us, we have this ability
to continue to innovate, customize our solutions and serve more and more
people, hopefully beyond just the crypto users. So yeah, so on the right hand side,
maybe we can go to the next slide then. Yeah, so on the right hand side, you can see the stack
that we're building. And then you guys know how early you are by looking at the arrows of the entire stack.
So the angle is going from the bottom to the top.
And then everybody here is basically at the ground floor.
As of today, or if more officially, next Tuesday, the 25th, once the token transfer is enabled,
that's the first stage launch for the Alcala chain.
And that's only the foundation of the network. And then there are many layers on top of it. From the base chain, and then
you're going to get the primitives that are being built. Think of those as in a solvent
blockchain or in a solvent nation, when you're rebuilding the financial infrastructure, you need a reserve bank, you need commercial banks, you need liquidity exchanges, all that
sort of stuff. That is the Acala's premises as providing those primitives before other folks
come and build. And then the next layer on top of that is the open protocol layer. This is where EVM compatibility and also future proof
for any other smart contract engines that are available
that we're able to support.
And then there will be many innovations happen
on the open protocol layer.
And then on top is potentially
there will also be a compliance layer,
just looking at where things are going.
This may be necessary before many of
those fintech companies will be able to connect and integrate with us. And then on top of that,
not only fintech, right, there's also retail payment or retail FI. There's also trade FI
that we are working with that are in the pipeline. Of course, those are in the longer term that's going to happen.
But in the very short term, we are innovating at a very, very ground level.
And again, I see a lot of chats, folks from all sorts of different places,
Singapore, France and everywhere.
So, and I can tell from your message that you are ACA holders.
And I think by holding an ACA, it's not like things going to happen, just drop from the thin air.
This is probably a lot of people just imagine if you're holding a token today,
you know, stuff's just going to happen when you wake up.
If you look at a dot on the left hand side, this is the current state of the blockchain.
If you look at a dot on the left-hand side, this is the current state of the blockchain.
If you're not innovating, if you're just copying and pasting, the circle doesn't get much larger.
However many of the users today is however many, because it's repeating the business model,
you're repeating the innovation, repeating the same tech stack, you're basically shifting the
farmers from one place to another. You're shifting the yield from one place to another. You're going
around the same circle with the same amount of people. But I think many people in the
space share the same vision as us, is we need to grow the pie bigger. This is the pie on
the right-hand side. In order to do well, you can imagine if you're doing exactly the same
thing as yesterday, would your future be slightly better? If I continue my behavior from yesterday,
no exercise, no meditation, no learning, no growth, would my future or tomorrow be slightly better
than today? Really doubt it, right. So what applies to individuals also applies
to innovation and technology is we need to innovate and do something different. And this
is where Akala comes in to provide and also polka dot, providing a different test stack to scale,
and also providing a different infrastructure for the majority of the financial world and majority of the people that have
a pathway to move and merge into what crypto brings people sovereignty, freedom and access.
So growing this pie is every ACA holder's responsibility.
You're not just holding a free ticket, you're holding a responsibility to help us to get
there as well.
And this comes from building, right right so as a core team so we
basically went all in uh to build a tech but i think everybody is a builder not just building
technology but also building content building community and then building relationship and
bringing more people's awareness and you you you are responsible so yeah so let, so let's do this together.
Next. Yeah. And then next coming down to something more practical, right?
Dan mentioned that through the two public cell event,
Build Up Color 1 and Build Up Color 2,
we've raised more than two million plus dots.
It's very important that you understand in a normal public sale, who gets the proceeds? Basically, the foundation or the project team
gets the proceeds, right? What do they normally use them for? They usually convert them into
dollars and then they can spend it to grow the network or build stuff or just like some other expenses.
You never know, right?
And what we have done at Acala is we so believe in the vision that we had,
and we so believe in what I just talked about where we are heading.
We're donating the entire proceeds from the two public sale events into the on-chain treasury.
from the two public sale events into the on-chain treasury.
And then by donating that entire 2 million plus dot in the treasury,
we forego the ownership of the dot onto the on-chain treasury.
And what does that mean for the ACA holders?
For the ACA holders, then you now have a stewardship over this treasury
as well as whatever this treasury generates.
I like the word treasury much better than ownership because I think right now in the
world that we live in, because of this ownership model, you have very small percentage of the
people owning almost the entire wealth of the entire population that's a wrong incentive alignment i think stewardship
is a much better way to manage resources so you only you so stewardship means every ownership you
actually take responsibility you're not only just by acquiring as much as you can without actually giving out to help store the resources that you get allocated.
So this is the vision for Acala is we don't know the perfect answer of what's the perfect way.
Anyone tells you they know the perfect answer public is lying.
We only know what's better.
So we've seen in the world this unfairness, unequalness happening,
and also this way of dealing can be improved.
And to our best knowledge, we created this model, right?
And then it's also very important that whatever ACA token you got today,
you already secure your share of this future because ACA token, unlike many other tokens, it's not dilutional, right? It's not diluted over time. It's a fixed supply. So whatever percentage you've got, you've got a share of not just this treasury, but the network as well as where the network is going right um and of
course uh uh it also comes into you know how uh along with the stewardship that you help uh you
know guide uh where things are going you know how do you actually get a return and enjoy the growth
and you coming from uh the treasury for example And this is where probably we'll spend a little bit
of time at the end to talk about ACA staking is coming.
And it's actually done in a way that's out of my surprise.
It's actually a community project initiative.
So we can spend a little bit of time
and talk about that and see what people think.
Yeah.
Right.
For people who were on our previous call in December,
we did go through this slide,
but I wanted to resurface this
and just reiterate a couple of points here
because one of the things that happens
when you're building in an ecosystem like Polkadot,
which is the only of its kind
and ETH 2 will be similar if that ever gets launched. But right now on Polkadot, which is the only of its kind, and ETH2 will be similar if that ever gets launched.
But right now on Polkadot, all these teams are building these parachains, and we won this
parachain auction in order to essentially connect to Polkadot and inherit Polkadot's security and
the interoperability between us and other blockchains on this network. But one thing that also comes with that is the
dependency on Polkadot itself, the development team to finish certain technologies that we need
in order to operate our network. So one thing to keep in mind is there are a lot of dependencies
on the Polkadot team. So with certain products that we're looking to launch, most notably,
with certain products that we're looking to launch,
most notably LDOT is reliant on a technology
called cross-chain messaging or XCM.
So that's one dependency just to be aware of.
And we're gonna be moving through these product rollouts
as quickly as we can,
knowing that there are these dependencies.
There's a couple of other things
that we do have dependencies on.
And luckily the team, the engineering team is very strong
and we're able to come up with some alternative solutions
to that.
But just wanted to highlight that.
The other thing is Polkadot as well as Akala
are very careful and conservative with how we roll out
products, with how we test.
So what you saw, if you've been following everything
on Kusama, things actually rolled out surprisingly quickly.
I wouldn't expect it to move quite as fast on Polkadot,
whether it's Akala or any other parachain team.
There's just a lot more value at stake
on the Polkadot network.
So people are kind of taking a little bit more
of a cautious approach and going for the kind of enterprise
grade security approach to security and testing.
Another thing is that Polkadot governance actually moves about four times slower than Kusama governance, which means for making proposals,
for getting changes through in the code, it takes a little bit longer.
So I'm just kind of setting expectations with that.
And then as we go through our launch, if you are in the Polkadot ecosystem for
maybe more than six months, you probably noticed that Parity Web3 Foundation,
Polkadot, Acala, we never give timelines.
We never give dates because that's very dangerous to do in software development.
If there's blockchain teams that give dates, it's very dangerous to do in in software development if there's blockchain
teams that give dates it's most likely just not even real tech because it's really hard to predict
when these when these timelines will actually end because so many things can come up that are
unpredictable so we're always going to do our best to tell you when things are coming soon
we'll start talking about things more when we think that they're coming out soon, but please just be aware that we'll most likely not give exact dates or
pre-announcements of anything that we're launching. So today, I know the main topic was
the token transfer, so I wanted to just go through the Akala launch roadmap here. I know Robin or
Jillian in the chat can throw the link in for this page. But let's just quickly check off or check
where we are in this process. So at the top, we've kind of broken it down by phases of governance.
Step phase one is completed, one, two, and three.
And then we're actually in phase two now.
So token transfers are right here, so January 25th.
We've finished most of the things in phase two here,
including support for LCDOTs, distribution of tokens,
including ACA and lc dot and these these other
these other pieces here are in process or are going to be completed soon token transfers
essentially what that means is that you can now your tokens are now going to be no longer locked
as of tuesday so you could send your aca to your mom or your sister. You could receive ACA
from a friend and do whatever you would like with those tokens, including things like voting
and governance, participating in a college network. So this is really one of the things that we need
to do to kickstart the networking, good things moving as we move along to different
products will begin to roll out so click into here so stablecoin ausd our decks that's built
into the chain and then the liquid dot staking will all be coming soon and then of course the
evm plus which i'm i'm going to get into in a little bit with Betty. Betty, is there anything else you want to add here?
Do you want to go back to the slide?
No, let's carry on.
Cool.
So I'll let you go through this.
I'll just click through one by one.
Yeah, so let's zoom in a little bit,
what you expect in the immediate term.
So for folks who supported us through the crowd loan, especially through the liquid
staking approach, thank you.
And then I think all of those tokens have been distributed.
And then you can either check on Subscan or on the distribution side.
That requires no claim or anything else yeah and there's 24 million of those
and the second thing very importantly everybody needs to understand is a lot of the stuff we do
is trying to make dot really great right i hope a lot of you like here not only you know akala but
you also know dot and polka dot and why it's important that it's the future of the web 3.0 of Internet.
Right. And then so it's important that we bring the DOT assets
from Polkadot relay chain onto the Arcata chain.
And as we were told, the XCM, the crushing stuff is going to be delayed.
But as Dan mentioned that we work out a way with the parity team
that we can actually bring the dot onto Acala with a one-way bridge.
And there's also ways for us to also withdraw those onto different places,
which I will share a little bit more.
So the first thing that will happen is we will try to open the dot bridge
as quickly as possible, maybe in the next week or two, so that you can start bringing your dot onto Acala and then start doing the trading and then also borrowing, etc.
it is we're going to open a few pools. Maybe to start with is LC DOT and a DOT pool.
So for those of you who hold DOT, you might want to get ready to unstake because this is an
opportunity potentially picking up some discounted DOT. So for a lot of the LC DOT holders, some of
them might want liquidity and they might want to just sell it before waiting for two years
to claim their dot back from the Alkala crowd loan.
So this might be a good time to be picking up those dots or just become a liquidity provider.
And the LP pools might be quite favorable because these two assets are basically stable assets, right?
because these two assets are basically stable assets, right?
You're not going to have much impermanent loss
because one dot is one dot.
One LC dot at the end of the day is also one dot.
So this is going to be a quite interesting trade,
unique on Acala, right?
Yeah, so let's keep moving.
And then once we've got both assets on chain,
we can open up a kind of dollar lending.
This is a very important instrument
because with one dot locked in the crowd long,
without the derivative, it's one dot.
But if you can, if once we created the LC dot,
one dot becomes two dot worth of value
to push up the economy. And then if you use the LC dot, one dot becomes two dot worth of value to bootstrap the economy.
And then if you use that two dot, well, the LC dot, and you can borrow a dollar,
that's another layer of lending. And with that, you're basically
gradually creating a larger and larger economy. And that's how economy can be bootstrapped and grown.
And of course, you know, those dollars or those coins need to be used in productive ways, like in the protocol, doing various things.
And of course, if you see a lot of bubble bursting is because people spend all of those on various different useless stuff.
So what we are trying to do here is you can think about now
you've got liquidity once we start and we start to have a full reserve bank. This is what a color
dollar is where you can deposit your assets and then you can leverage out of it. And then after
that is hopefully by then the XCM stuff will be ready by Polkadot, and it will open up this non-custodial liquid staking.
It's also very important for everyone to know,
liquid staking is not just another place to stake.
Right now, all the dots are staked on the relay chain,
and it's sitting there doing nothing.
And the economy is not growing because you are staking, right?
That's why there's no correlation of how much dot being staked
or locked in crowd loan versus what's happening out there.
So it's very important that we use a derivative product to stake.
Of course, that's non-custodial, that's trustless,
that also gives you the same or even better returns for staking.
But at the same time, very important,
those dock, one dock becomes two dock,
and then it can circulate in the market
and then do a lot more, not just for the owner,
and that's of course, but also for the whole ecosystem,
the economy grow.
Imagine our dock can also be used in another protocol,
maybe for staking and earning some
other yields in the ecosystem. So that's that. And then once that happened, we will also have
a multi-chain bridge. Hopefully there's an announcement on that. I won't reveal which one,
but this basically allows Acala to connect into multiple different ecosystems beyond just Ethereum, but also a few others as well.
So this opens us up from a local economy into a more global economy.
So assets coming in to the Acala chain for lending and borrowing and trading, but also the Acala dollar can also go on to different places to trade.
but also the Akala dollar can also go on to different places to trade.
And along this way, then you will probably see a number of ecosystem protocols.
There's a lot of them, but of course, I'm particularly excited about a few of them.
And one of them is the Akala staking through this ecosystem project called Aquadal,
which we'll review a little bit more detail slightly later.
And then there's also a curve-like synthetic asset staking protocol
to give you rewards for trading and becoming a liquidity provider
for stable assets, which will be very interesting for LCDOT, LDOT, DOT,
and also various different type of stable coins
that's going to come to the Akala ecosystem.
And then, and also a lending protocol
that's being built as well.
That's a native to the DAW and Akala ecosystem.
It's also very exciting.
And these are natively built,
but there's a whole bunch of migrated protocols as well
along the way.
So they will come on board once the full EVM plus is being launched.
And then the top right corner, you can see we've now got a family of assets, right?
You've got LCDA, you've got LDOT, you've got Akala dollar and et cetera, et cetera.
And then we'll be able to list them beyond just the DEX within Akala.
That could be other DEXs on other ecosystems,
but also non-decentralized exchanges as well.
And hope you are gonna be excited about those
that you can trade all different sort of Acala family assets
onto different avenues.
Yeah.
Cool. I just wanna add one point on LCDOT,
just going back to the very beginning.
If you're not aware of
the kind of the details of how lcdot works and you hold lcdot um please just be careful with with the
decisions that you make and make sure you're doing your research on how everything works um lcdot is
your only receipt for redeeming the dot that you contributed to the crowd on.
So just to reiterate, if you get rid of your LC dot or if you sell it,
you will need to rebuy LC dot in order to redeem that for your dot in two years.
So just be careful. Make sure you do your research.
And we're not trying to give any financial advice at all, but just make sure people know that this is a complex product.
It's a derivative of a crowd loan dot.
New for all of us.
This is a new thing for everyone.
So just be aware of that as you're making those decisions.
Betty, why don't you go through these two and then I'll pick up the next one.
Yeah.
So I think everyone is maybe a lot of people interested to know why didn't we launch EVM like yesterday? So there's a reason there's a plus at the end. Right. So let me explain. So for most of the EVM chains out there already, they're basically old wine in a new bottle. Right. So it's exactly the same test stack, the EVM sandbox, and it's not trying to grow the pie. It's just like repeat the success of others and then also continue to kind of like having this hype bubble everywhere.
I think it's good because crypto space is very experimental and it's also very fun to go to different places to farm, to be honest.
However, you know, with what I what I laid out is the ultimate goal
is to actually grow the pie.
If you're keeping the old wine in a new bottle,
you're not growing the wine.
You're not making new wines.
So what we are trying to do is make new wines
while it fits into the same bottle.
And if you're using exactly the same tag,
you're also missing out what the new tag actually brings you,
and you're kind of missing out the growing pie part of the story. So for example, within
the Polkadot ecosystem, if you're using the standard or the old EVM technology, then the
cross Polkadot perishing liquidity, and also all the Polkadot substrate features would
not be accessible by normal MetaMask uses.
So then you kind of lose the point of using Polkadot at all, right?
You're probably better off using any other sort of EVM technology out there.
And then the second thing is if you continue to live in the EVM sandbox
without the ability to use the new features, then you're missing out a lot.
For example, Substrate node is
much more lightweight and inexpensive to run.
But if you just use the old EVM tech,
it becomes expensive, you can actually scale.
Then also, Substrate have ability to focus upgrade,
and there's a lot more functionality that you can add
onto it like what we did at Acala.
If you're living in an old tech, basically all of those innovations you've done, no one
can access.
If there's new builders, new protocol providers come along, they won't be able to use it.
And that's also why I think some of the fintech folks and also the more, I guess, institution
folks come along, they have certain requirements.
They go everywhere.
It's exactly the same tech.
No one can innovate out of the box.
And then those who can will probably will have more opportunity to actually integrate and expand their user base beyond crypto, I guess.
So maybe going just a little bit specific.
So some of the stuff that we already have as a feature list, right?
So you can pay gas fees in any token on our EVM, stable coins, whatever you like, using MetaMask.
And then you can also support customizable fee schedule.
So you can have zero fee transactions.
So you might deploy a contract and you just like, you know, serve your customers and then the customers don't need to pay fees.
And then you could either pay fees on behalf or have a subscription model to it.
And this is not possible, basically, on a normal EVM chain and doing subscription and things like that. And then, and of course, we're able to support both ERC20
and also like basically any Ethereum compatible token standard
as well as the substrate native token seamlessly.
There's no new token standard or whatever.
Everything is ERC20.
You don't need to move coins in and out.
It's basically one platform seamlessly transferable.
And then the fourth thing is more extensible list of DeFi features that we provided for folks who
come and build. So we have the ability for people to build on-chain keepers. This is like one of the
elephants that people don't want to mention, but it's there on Ethereum.
There's a lot of servers being run privately or by the group and then managing million,
billion dollar transactions off-chain. You can do all of this on-chain on Acala. This is,
I guess, one of the things that people overlook, but if you want to get to the certain level, those are the things you must have as the baseline for you to integrate
with a much bigger audience. And then, and other things, I won't go into too much detail, like
Oracle's feeds are prioritized on the EVM as well. So all protocol developers can enjoy that.
EVM as well. So all protocol developers can enjoy that. And the most important thing is the upgrade
ability. So with the ability to upgrade any new changes, like if there's new feature for, say,
compliance, and those are made available immediately onto the EVM for the EVM developers,
right? So imagine you can actually change the engine without affecting its security,
without affecting all of
its economics also not affecting ux because it's there's no fox right and then the developers
continue to enjoy those benefits and so as the flow-on effect for the for the users at the end
and also needless to say making the evm plus compatible with all the MetaMask and also all the Ethereum tooling
and support both ecosystems. So you basically, if you're an existing Polkadot user, you could use
that for contracts deployed on EVM and vice versa. So basically, people can go, whichever they choose
to do will be fine. So yeah. so this slide is basically just a visual representation
of what betty just walked through i'll just highlight a couple things so um this is on the
left a standard layer one blockchain with an evm environment built on top um these this red outline
is here to met uh to show you that this is essentially you're kind of locked in the confines of this
old EVM environment. The reason why we've been spending months to build our EVM plus is because
we've actually built a layer here between the EVM and between substrate. It's essentially an
adapter. If you're technical, we're using pre-compiled smart contracts to allow the EVM to interact with Substrate.
So the reason why we're calling this the EVM Plus is because we're combining the Ethereum virtual machine with Substrate.
So Gavin Wood's first invention at Ethereum with the new framework that he built to build much more customizable blockchains on Polkadot,
which is Substrate. And then this is a look into our blockchain. So as you can see over here on
the left, typically like stable coins, decentralized exchanges, staking applications are built on top
of the EVM. What we've actually done is we've built these products into our blockchain itself.
So this is a layer one chain, just like over here.
But in the chain, you have a stable coin, you have a DEX, you have a staking product.
And then some of these things that Betty was just talking about, these features to allow gas fee customization and things like that.
It's important to know that these are all built into the chain because this allows anything building on top of the blockchain to be able to interact with everything built at the chain, the chain level below.
So I want I added this here just to highlight to one of the cool things is that when teams are coming and building on the EVM,
we're already getting feedback from people that are building applications on the EVM plus and giving us almost like a wish list like i wish i wish the blockchain could do this i wish my application
could do this and because of the flexibility and because of the ability to upgrade the blockchain
without forking it we can can we can continue adding new functionality into the chain and just
simply upgrading it so anyone building on the acala evm plus knows that
they're going to be building on a blockchain that will not get old because it will constantly be
improving over time with that being said betty we've got about 14 minutes and um we apologize
if we don't have a whole lot of time for questions we have an uh an interview where we're hiring quite a few people right now.
So we've got to go in about 14 minutes.
But Betty, take us through Aqua and we'll see if we can get to some questions at the end.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, so maybe we'll go into a little bit more into Akata staking and then growing the Akata treasury.
So a sneak peek into this AquaDAO community
project, which seems very exciting. So let's go to the next slide and go right into it.
Yeah. So folks here, if you don't already notice, ACA has a fixed supply, right? Most other coins
out there, they're inflationary. The difference between the two, maybe a real world example. I just checked
my bank account yesterday. They're giving me like a 2% roughly interest rate on my savings
and I should feel happy about it. But then at the back of it, there's probably 20% inflation
over the last year due to COVID or anything else. Of course, I only focus on the 2% I earned,
but I forgot about the minus 18% that I lost
due to inflation.
This is an inflationary model, right?
And so the design for Acala or ACA is,
I understand what happens in the real world very well.
By inflation, basically, whose money got taken away? It's
basically those everyday people. You holding to that coin, basically, is the note, the dollar
in your pocket. And then without taking away that one piece of note, they're taking away its value
by inflation. So when we design design a color we know this really well
we also know how the blockchain game play very well so we thought a fixed supply is probably
a way more response responsible and a better way out for everybody to kind of like have a store
of value over time but also at the time, for new projects to come along,
you need to bootstrap, you need to sustain your technology,
especially in a polka dot environment.
You need crowd loan to sustain your network security every two years.
So how do you solve that conflict between you have a fixed supply,
but you also need some incentive to help you to grow the ecosystem.
So that was the white paper. If someone can drop that white paper is a color treasury.
It was written, I'll look at the day again. It was like written two years ago. We're obviously
two years too early when we wrote that paper. It's basically how you can actually kind of like
collectively build up this treasury. So once you build up this treasury, your network
becomes sovereign. You can even think about it's like a sovereign nation, and you have this wealth
fund. Then over time, this wealth fund can distribute those shares and distribute the yield
and also grows back into whoever holds the passport of that nation, which is the ACA token.
And this is how we were thinking when we are designing this whole system.
And then with holding the ACA, you kind of preserve your share of the network.
And then somehow the ACA treasury, as well as growing of the network, more activities,
and also all of those stuff that we talked just now
is going to help us to build up this nation together. And of course, if you can go to the
next slide, Dan, AquaDAO, why I think it's a very interesting idea is basically it heavily
references the white paper that we wrote, which was like a concept design that we wrote two years ago, basically putting those ideas into protocol control policies, basically building the thing on chain as autonomous sort of a way to manage the treasury and the reserve.
And it has ability to grow the Alcala treasury.
We didn't start from zero which
is pretty pretty awesome we started with two million uh dot but it has the ability to grow
the Alcala treasury over time and also its own reserve and then also it provides a way for ACA
holders to access those growths and also the future youth through staking. So this is a very interesting part.
So I'm speaking this as ACA token holders, right?
So that's why I think it's a very cool way that I can see how the Okada treasury is going
to be continued to build up and ACA holders actually get continued kind of like share
over time. And it also in its design has this thing to empower more governance engagement.
So this is through delegated voting and also vested voting in their plan.
So I think that's also going to be interesting because in the reserve,
you're not only having stakers staking ACA, you also have a dot and various different form of dot like L dot in the reserve.
And potentially this can be a pooled tokens to participate in a color voting as well as polka dot voting.
And maybe beyond that depends on, I guess, where people want the reserve to go.
And then essentially at the end of the day, once this is all built up,
like the treasury and the reserve is built up,
you already have the tokens that's got value, that's got yield and utility.
Basically it's like DOT, right?
For the treasury, one of the most important things is we have enough DOT
so that for the next crowd loan, we don't need to print more ACA. We have enough DOT in the
treasury reserve to actually pay for another parachain slot easy. Then DOT itself provides
yield. Through liquid staking, we can do that very easily on the Akala platform.
Through liquid staking, we can do that very easily on our Kala platform.
And ultimately, once you've gone through the initial stage,
potentially you could also deploy excessive reserve to other places to help the ecosystem grow.
But in a way, it ties back the yield to the ACA holders.
For example, it could potentially fund parachain crowd loans and also grow your asset portfolio
and doing all sorts of things
that also power ACA token holders. Yeah, so I won't go into too much detail because I think
folks only released a little bit of details online, so we'll see what happens next and then
hopefully this gets built very quickly so we all get to enjoy ACA staking. So yeah,
quickly so we all get to enjoy ACA staking.
So yeah, and then one thing to point out is the model is done is ACA stakers will get
shares from this whole aqua DAO reserve, but also you can subscribe into the aqua DAO using
your existing assets.
So LC DOT holders don't just think about trade away your LC DOTs.
You could also use LC dot to subscribe into this
Aquadial and do a whole bunch of things with it.
So yeah, so a lot of things to come.
So hold on to it and let's await ACA staking.
Yeah, so you can go onto the website aquadial.app
and also the Twitter to follow them.
I don't think there's anything happening.
So it's like very boring right now.
Everybody is probably building.
So, yeah.
Cool.
So we've got...
Yeah, so for one thing I want to answer, I'm looking at all the chats and stuff,
it's a relationship between Akala and Karura.
For those who don't know, in a Polkadot ecosystem, there's Polkadot and there's also Kusama as the
Canary network. For Akala, it's the same. We also have a Canary network called Karura,
launched on Kusama, and then Akala launched on Polkadot. You got to think about the two this way, right? They are
not separate. So they are almost like they cannot live without each other, basically. So
for all the tech, it's proven on Karura. Without Karura, Akala is not going to do all the stuff
that I mentioned. All the tech, all the fancy stuff that we do cross-chain and then doing all of those
application integration into FinTech, it's all proven on Karura. So Karura is the technical intrinsic value for Acala. However, when you see the Dow and then the treasury,
Acala has got 2 million. Acala is the economic interest of value supporting Karura because of the technical
importance, basically a strategic importance of Karura. Akala economy is going to continue to
bring Karura up. For example, practically some of the treasury part of it will be used to put into
Karura treasury to support economic growth there.
The two you can think about is one is the smaller boat, one is the much bigger boat, and they're all on the ocean. The goal is we grow the oceans. If the ocean level goes up,
the two boats go up, but one is always the bigger boat, one is the smaller boat. The bigger boat is
Akala, the smaller boat is Kar karura and one is proving supporting the
other with technical capability that's karura and and another is like karura supporting karura
economically so if the two goes into positive cycle then you can see we're doing really well
and you can't lift one without the other otherwise you are basically testing everything on production
right so yeah betty the the most asked question is related to the the end of the presentation Otherwise, you are basically testing everything on production. So, yeah.
Betty, the most asked question is related to the end of the presentation.
So is there a minimum for ACA staking?
Do you know?
Sorry?
A minimum for ACA staking required?
I don't know.
It doesn't get reviewed on the material.
So there's a forum post like you guys can take a look and have a look at the, also there's like a, I think there's like a documentation and going through all the details.
I don't think it's full though.
I think folks just release a little bit and then maybe there are more details coming soon.
I'll put the post here if anyone's interested. Okay, a few more minutes. So
exchanges were not we're not going to talk about when is the coin listing launching the coins
launching on Tuesday. It's based on block time. So the estimate is 5. UTC on Tuesday, January 25th.
That could slightly shift based on block times, but I guess it's safe to say by Wednesday things will be transferable.
Tokens will be transferable. I actually answered a lot of these already. Okay. I know we've got just a couple more minutes. Yeah, people are asking about exchanges.
We don't talk about exchanges. Exchanges will list ACA if they want to.
So I guess just-
And they can do whatever they want
after token transfer is enabled.
Yeah.
Okay.
What I'll do is go through the questions.
If there are questions that we hadn't answered
that are good questions.
We'll go ahead and try to either answer them via text or maybe maybe video and post that to the to all of you.
Another thing we heard that a lot of people in the chat like Betty's hoodie.
So we're going to go through and pick our 10 favorite questions that people asked throughout the Crowdcast today and send you guys hoodies to your to your front door.
So be on the lookout for that. We'll we'll send you an email if you were selected for the hoodie.
So 10 of you will be lucky to get one of those nice hoodies.
One minute to go. Like I said, Akala's hiring. If you're excited about
what we're building, if you're excited about the future of hybrid finance, definitely look at our
job board. We're hiring pretty much across the board, including an interview now, like I said,
in a minute. We've had so much success last year in terms of just the community growth
and getting to know a lot of you guys in the community.
So thanks, everybody, for supporting both of our networks, Karura and Akala.
And we can't wait to continue growing these two networks this year and beyond this year.
As we go through this launch, just like with Karura, we'll be keeping everyone updated on community calls on Discord.
We'll be coming back to Crowdcast every once in a while
for presentations and just keeping everyone updated
on every step throughout the process here.
Besides that, everybody have a good day, good night,
wherever you are.
Definitely join us in the Discord.
That's our kind of main communication channel
for the community.
So join us there if you have questions.
And thanks, everybody, for taking the time
to listen to the presentation today.
And thanks for the support.
Thanks, guys.
