Astar onboarding Polkadot Relay Chain — Launch strategy
After years of preparing and dreaming for that parachain slot on Polkadot. Astar Network won the 3rd auction on Thursday, December 2, with block number #7927110. Astar runtime is ready to be onboarded to the Polkadot Relay Chain on December 18 and joins the other winners Acala, Moonbeam, Parallel, and Clover.
Becoming the 3rd slot winner is something we couldn’t have done without the support of our community, supporters, and continuous support of our Ambassadors. Thank you to everyone! In total, more than 100,000 unique wallets joined our Crowdloan event spread over supported CEXs, platforms like Equilibrium and Parallel Fi, supported wallets, and others I may have forgotten.
Winning that parachain slot was one hurdle of so many others to follow. The Astar core team has set a launching strategy to get Astar Network ready for upcoming weeks! After the initial launch on Polkadot, we will release our complete roadmap for 2022 and what to expect from the Astar Ecosystem. We are just at the beginning! Let's build Web3 together!
Astar launch strategy
Astar team has learned a lot during the launch of Shiden Network on Kusama, and with our expertise, knowledge, and experience, we will be able to launch Astar much faster. Topics like reward calculations and vesting schedules are very delicate and will be handled with care and double-checked by our lead developers and product manager.
Astar will host a Crowdcast event on Tuesday, December 21, to explain our launch strategy, talk about our plans and answer any questions from the community. Join this unique event because we have some swag giveaways and unique Astar NFTs for those on the Crowdcast. The recording would be attached later to this article if you missed it.
Astar launch roadmap
Like we did for Shiden Network, we also created a clear overview of the Astar Network parachain launch. The roadmap is divided into 2 phases, starting with registering the Astar parathread and ending with enabling staking on Astar.
Launching a smart-contracts-centric Substrate chain — What did we learn?
Following the Kusama ideology, we deployed Shiden — a wild cousin of Astar, a smart-contract parachain empowered by a multi-virtual machine. Shiden parachain is designed for deploying EVM and WASM contracts and dApp staking, at the same time, future-proof with active developments in bringing layer2 solutions to the Polkadot ecosystem.
WebAssembly Smart Contracts
While some focus on bringing solutions to one developer family, Astar's main focus is on two kinds of families. The first family is blockchain developers, who build smart contracts with Solidity and are familiar with using Ethereum tools. Astar made all those tools available in our EVM environment for supporting the EVM developers.
The second developer family is those who want to build with Rust. The same language Substrate is made with the framework of Polkadot. Currently, Rust is the most used new language on Github, and more institutions and developers are discovering the power of Rust. Supporting WASM in the Astar ecosystem will bring a whole new wave of developers to the blockchain industry. Big institutions are other businesses that want to utilize the power of blockchain can now use their in-house developers to build smart contracts in WASM because they are already familiar with the language that can be compiled to WASM. What's so special about WASM? Because it's just an instruction format, the magic of WASM is that it can be used as a portable compilation target for other languages without sacrificing speed as you would have with transpiling. This includes languages like C++ and Rust, which can now run on the web when compiled to WASM. Using WASM for smart contracts will scale the use of blockchain in our daily lives. It will solve all the problems EVM is facing related to scalability.
Our lead developers in Astar will work closely with the Parity team on the contract pallet and their project Canvas, a future common good parachain, to improve WASM use inside the Polkadot ecosystem. Gavin Woods, co-founder of Polkadot, creator of EVM, and inventor of the Solidity language for writing smart contracts. He developed the ink! language for utilizing the design of Polkadot inside smart contracts. Ink! is a domain-specific language for writing smart contracts in Rust and compiles to WASM code.
B2E (Build-2-Earn) protocol
One of the biggest issues facing new projects building dApps is finding financial support to kickstart their developments. Unfortunately, many successful dApps in the crypto space get their initial financial support from venture capitalists and large financial firms. Projects, in return, give away a healthy share of their revenue, either in the form of a private agreement or in the form of a sizable portion of their native token. Other financial strategies for beginning projects include private token sales, selling early access NFTs, winning grants, or obtaining traditional bank loans. Since there is no easy way for the everyday crypto enthusiast to support early dApps, these projects are leaving a vast amount of potential financial support on the table. The Astar ecosystem aims to fix that with dApp staking.
The past: dApp staking v1
Finding the perfect balance for the reward mechanism between stakers (nominators) and operators (developers) has been challenging and is still evolving. With the feedback from our community and analyzing current data, we are still improving our unique staking mechanism. Like Shiden is for Astar and Kusama for Polkadot, so will be dApp staking on Shiden be for dApp staking on Astar.
Currently, we have 24 projects listed in our dApp staking mechanism and +10.7M $SDN locked on our projects.
The future: dApp staking v2
Next month we will release our milestone for 2022. We have milestones focused on dApp staking, like redesigning and building dynamic tokenomics around dApp staking with APY differentiator for each dApp. Integrate XCM into dApp staking to implement our unique staking mechanism across parachains. Another huge demand from our community is to build on-chain governance on top of our dApp staking.
2021 was the year of launching our parachains in the Polkadot ecosystem. 2022 will be the year of scaling the Polkadot ecosystem and introducing the B2E protocol to a broader range of developers.
About Astar
Astar Network (previously known as Plasm) is a dApp hub on Polkadot that supports Ethereum, WebAssembly, and layer 2 solutions like ZK Rollups. Astar aims to be a multi-chain smart contract platform that will support multiple blockchains and virtual machines. Polkadot Relay Chain doesn't support smart contracts. That's why it's essential for the ecosystem to have a parachain that enables this for all developers who want to build in the Polkadot ecosystem. Astar is here to provide the best solution for all developers by supporting EVM and making a parachain where EVM and WASM smart contracts can co-exist and communicate with each other.
