Bison Trails Announce Support for Upcoming Acala – The DeFi Hub of Polkadot

Bison Trails will be supporting Acala and Karura which help expand decentralized financial services in the Polkadot ecosystem.

Acala is the DeFi hub of Polkadot and Karura is Acala’s sister protocol providing a DeFi network for the Kusama community.

Acala’s built-in protocols include a trustless liquid-staking derivatives protocol, a multi-collateralized stablecoin (aUSD) backed by cross-chain assets, and a decentralized automated market maker asset exchange. Acala is Ethereum-compatible and allows gas fees to be paid in any token.

Bison Trails, which is a blockchain infrastructure platform-as-a-service company, will launch support for Karura in July 2021, operating the boot nodes used to bootstrap the Karura network in its early launch stages. Acala is expected to be added soon, once the protocol launches on mainnet after winning a parachain slot auction on Polkadot later in 2021.

The firm will then offer enterprise-grade collator infrastructure for both Karura and Acala. As the network matures, Acala ecosystem partners may run collator infrastructure on the Bison Trails platform. Collators pass Acala’s blocks to randomly selected subset of Polkadot’s relay chain validators, who then validate and finalize the blocks for inclusion in the shared state of Polkadot.

Joe Lallouz, CEO of Bison Trails, said: “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 applications and services on the Polkadot ecosystem. We are excited to work with Acala and Karura, supporting their security and growth in these early stages.”

Acala will be launching with 15-20 collators permissioned by the Acala Foundation. Acala aims to transition from an authorized collator set to a public collator model, offering interested parties an opportunity to run Acala collators, stake ACA to secure them, attract community delegations, and earn ACA rewards. Early participation should pave the way for a successful transition from an authorized collator set to a public collator model.

Ruitao So, Co-founder and CEO of Acala and Karura, said: “This month, Karura’s global network of supporters contributed over 500,000 KSM tokens, equivalent to over $100 million, 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.”