Astar Network to raise $22 million, funds to go towards enhancing interoperability

Two-and-half-year-olds aren’t expected to do much in real life, but that isn’t the case in the crypto sector. In fact, a project under development for 2.5 years is now making headlines across the industry after its ‘rags to riches’ story ended with a lucrative strategic investment round.

A crypto fairy tale?

Having won in one of the Polkadot parachain slot auctions back in 2021, Astar Network enjoyed its mainnet debut on 17 January, 2022. Now, the project has announced a $22 million strategic fundraiser led by Polychain. Other investors included Alameda Research, Crypto.com Capital, and Polkadot founder Gavin Wood.

In its press release, the Astar Network team also shared plans to connect L1 chains and several smart contract virtual machines. It reported,

“Currently, 2 Ethereum bridges are live and 1 Cosmos bridge is under heavy development. We will connect all major chains by Q4 this year.”

This is one feature that Astar has stressed on, to stand out from the pack. The dApp hub supports Solidity contracts and Polkadot native smart contracts, as well as both Ethereum Virtual Machine [EVM] bridges and non-EVM L1 bridges.

In essence, the endgame is interoperability.

Furthermore, as if Astar didn’t have enough reason to celebrate, the project announced a DeFi milestone. As of 29 January, Astar reached $400 million in total value locked [TVL].

Astar’s TVL just hit $400,000,000 today! And, more than 16,500 token holders have locked $ASTR!!

Go to our portal and check the status!https://t.co/s2QRcJMc3H pic.twitter.com/EOgoHNkUPE

— Astar Network – Multichain Smart Contract Hub (@AstarNetwork) January 29, 2022

Check your wallets and pockets

The news might have been buried under the market bloodshed, but the Polkadot parachain slot auctions have been going on and new winners have joined the list of projects to be onboarded. The most recent winner was Centrifuge.

Meanwhile, other contestants were preparing for the next auction that is set to begin in another week or so. At press time, the HydraDX was in the lead with 2.3060 million DOT while Interlay was the runner-up with 1.5527 million DOT.

The winning parachains from the second round of auctions are due to be on-boarded in March 2022.

Source: Polkadot.js.org

A change in the air?

Red may soon be going out of fashion as the top 25 cryptos take to green again. At press time, Polkadot’s DOT was trading at $18.62. This was after rising by 5.63% in the last 24 hours. However, its rise in the past seven days was 0.59%.