Acala (ACA), a De-Fi focused network built on Polkadot (DOT), announced Wednesday that it is launching a $250 million “aUSD Ecosystem Fund” to support startups on any Polkadot or Kusama parachain. 

Dan Reecer, Chief Growth Officer at Acala, listed 2 goals for the aUSD Ecosystem Fund: 

    1) To support and facilitate investment in early-stage teams building in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem with a strong use case for the aUSD          stablecoin

     2) Grow the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem through increased cross-chain activity and growth of Polkadot’s native stablecoin, aUSD 

Acala Dollar (aUSD) is the native decentralized stable coin of Polkadot, backed only by decentralized assets in Collateralized Debt Positions or CDPs. The goal of the coin is to become the backbone of DeFi on Polkadot and Kusama. 

Acala was founded in October, 2019 by its four co-founders with a vision of creating a DeFi-focused parachain in the Polkadot ecosystem. A part of that vision was to launch a native stable coin, which they did in February of this year. Now this most recent announcement comes in an effort to grow that stable coin. 

As it stands over 30 venture firms are invested in the fund including Hypersphere, Pantera and Jump Crypto. In addition to venture capitalists, nine Polkadot parachain teams are getting in on the action. 

Author: Tyler Irvin