Bison Trails, a blockchain infrastructure platform-as-a-service company, today announced that it will be supporting Acala, a DeFi hub for Polkadot, as well as Karura, Acala’s sister protocol providing a DeFi network for the Kusama community.
Acala will come to market with its own built-in protocols. These include a trustless liquid-staking derivatives protocol, a multi-collateralized stablecoin (aUSD) backed by cross-chain assets, and a decentralized AMM exchange. Acala is also Ethereum-compatible, with gas fees payable in any token.
This month, Bison Trails will launch support for Karura. It will operate the boot nodes used to bootstrap the Karura network in its early launch stages. Next, support for Acala will be added once the protocol launches on mainnet after winning a parachain slot auction on Polkadot later in 2021.
Bison Trails will offer enterprise-grade collator infrastructure for Karura and Acala. This will help secure the network in the early stages of its launch.
As the network matures, there will be openings for Acala ecosystem partners to run collator infrastructure on Bison Trails. Collators pass Acala’s blocks to a randomly selected subset of Polkadot’s relay chain validators; who then validate and finalize the blocks for inclusion in the shared state of Polkadot.
“Bison Trails has deep expertise in the Polkadot ecosystem and Substrate-based chains; that make us uniquely positioned to support Karura and Acala. These new networks represent an inflection point for the growing suite of DeFi apps and services on the Polkadot ecosystem. We are excited to work with Acala and Karura, supporting their security and growth in these early stages.”
– Joe Lallouz, CEO of Bison Trails
Launch Plan of Acala
Acala will be launching with 15-20 collators permissioned by the Acala Foundation. The advancement of both networks during their early stages will be overseen by the Acala Foundation.
Down the line, Acala aims to transition from an authorized collator set to a public collator-based model. It plans to offer interested parties an opportunity to run Acala collators, stake ACA to secure them, attract community delegations, and earn ACA rewards.
Participating early in Acala as a collator operator helps make the network more robust and decentralized. It also helps establish credibility as a collator operator and trusted ecosystem partner and paves the way for a successful transition from an authorized collator set to a public collator form.
“This month, Karura’s global network of supporters contributed over 500,000 KSM tokens, equivalent to over $100M, in a crowdloan; representing community demand for interoperable, decentralized finance products. We are excited to work with Bison Trails to help grow Karura and Acala and enable us to bring an ever-growing suite of DeFi services to our community members. Working with Bison Trails to support the top parachain projects will enable network participants to bypass years of learning how to operate successfully within the Polkadot ecosystem.”
– Ruitao So, Co-Founder & CEO of Acala and Karura