Parallel Finance Wins Polkadot’s Fourth Parachain Auction

Parallel Finance has won Polkadot’s fourth parachain auction. It joins the other winning projects: Acala, Moonbeam, and Astar.

An Ecosystem Sprouts

Parallel Finance has emerged as the winner of Polkadot’s fourth parachain auction, securing its spot in the Polkadot ecosystem for almost two years. Polkadot parachains are individual blockchains that integrate into the main Polkadot Relay Chain via “slots” and are interoperable with each other through bridges.

Projects compete to win slots through the process of parachain auctions. To win a slot in the Polkadot ecosystem’s parachain auctions, contributors and investors cast votes by staking DOT tokens. To win its slot, Parallel Finance garnered over 10.75 million DOT tokens total, which was equivalent to around $306 million. 

Its founder, Rubo Yuan, expressed gratitude toward contributors for “helping us to become part of the Polkadot ecosystem by securing a parachain.”

This made Parallel Finance the project with the third-largest DOT contribution in the Polkadot parachain auctions so far, slightly ahead of Astar, which won the third parachain auction. There was a big jump, though, between the first and second winners of the parachain auction–Acala and Moonbeam, respectively. Acala put forward a contribution of roughly 32.5 million DOT, and Moonbeam a contribution of roughly 35.75 million DOT. 

Parallel Finance achieved more contributions than other notable projects vying for a parachain slot, such as the Efinity NFT and metaverse project, which currently sits in sixth place with approximately 4.5 million DOT staked on its behalf. 

Parallel Finance will be awarded its lease on the slot on Dec. 17 of this year, which will last until Oct. 20, 2023. Contributors to the project will be rewarded with the PARA token at a rate estimated to be around 25 PARA tokens per DOT contributed. According to the project’s team, these lock-up rewards will be distributed in nine different batches spread out over the duration of the lease, with the first round slated to be distributed on Dec. 22. 

Parallel Finance is an “institutional-grade” lending protocol for DeFi that launched in April of this year, with major backers like Alameda Research, Sequoia, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. It seeks to “provide unique lending solutions tailored to Polkadot while assuring user safety and security.”

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned DOT and several other cryptocurrencies.