May at Polkadex
Parachain auction win, Acala aUSD partnership, PolkaIDO public testnet release, Orderbook dev work… This was May at Polkadex
It’s almost summer which means things are heating up. Polkadex is no exception. Thanks in large part to Polkadex’s parachain auction win, May was one of the most significant months since the start of the project. However, it was not the only important development of the month. Between the Thea and PolkaIDO testnet release, the partnership with Acala, and the extension of wallet support from Nova Wallet and Fearless, the Polkadex team had a packed month! Read on for a comprehensive summary of everything that went down at Polkadex in May.
The Polkadex network hit some important growth milestones in May, surpassing the 2 million PDEX benchmark to reach approximately 2.25 million total PDEX staked. Currently the PDEX staking rewards are at 35.5% with about 12% of the total supply of PDEX now staked. In case you have not started staking yet, you can now get native PDEX in any centralized exchange PDEX is listed on, or migrate your PDEX in order to start staking.
The Polkadex network was also successfully updated to v1.0.8 via a runtime upgrade issued after most validators updated to the latest Substrate version. The new version prepares the network for upcoming mainnet rollouts.
While on the subject, Thea and PolkaIDO were rolled out to the public testnet in early May, with development focusing on bug fixing and making improvements prior to PolkaIDO’s mainnet release.
The bulk of development work, however, centered around Polkadex Orderbook. From integrating the Orderbook with the internal testnet, to populating the UI with the backend code, Polkadex developers were in a final sprint all month to get Polkadex Orderbook out to the public testnet in June.
In May, the spotlight mainly shone on the success of the Polkadex Crowdloan and the auction 16 parachain slot victory. For anybody out of the loop, Polkadex won a parachain slot, is now more embedded than ever in the Polkadot ecosystem, and can now seamlessly connect to other parachains.
In early May, Polkadex Head of Marketing Dagmara Handzlik attended and spoke at Blockchain Fest in Cyprus. Throughout the month, we also held two different AMA sessions on Twitter Spaces, one of them including Alex Melikhov from Equilibrium to chat about the Polkadex Crowdloan. After the parachain auction win, Polkadex CEO and Co-Founder Gautham J even joined the monthly Polkadot Community Call to officially introduce Polkadex to the wider Polkadot community. Last but not least, Deepansh dropped into RiRi Gone Wild’s YouTube channel for an in-depth Polkadex interview.
In partnership news, we announced a partnership with Acala to integrate Acala’s aUSD stablecoin as the default stablecoin of the Polkadex ecosystem. aUSD will provide Polkadex traders with a cross-chain stable asset backed by reserve assets like DOT, KSM, ACA, KAR, BTC, and ETH. Since aUSD is a stablecoin collateralized by multiple assets, this partnership also lays the foundation for PDEX to become eligible as collateral for aUSD minting. This would create new opportunities for PDEX holders while giving the PDEX token a huge utility boost.
Speaking of new opportunities for PDEX holders, both Nova Wallet and Fearless added support for PDEX during the month of May. This means you can now store and manage your native PDEX directly from your mobile device! What’s more, with Nova Wallet you can even stake your PDEX and nominate validators.
During May, the Polkadex community showed its strength by coming together to contribute nearly 1 million DOT and ensure Polkadex’s parachain slot. While over 2,300 contributors helped Polkadex become the top Crowdloan in batch 3 of the Polkadot parachain auctions, the Polkadex community did not stop there.
There are now around 62,500 Polkadexers on Twitter, almost 21,000 members across our English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, India, German and Turkish Telegram channels, 4,112 followers on Medium, 3,413 Polkadot.js accounts holding native PDEX, 2,865 members on Discord, 1,633 members in the Polkadex subreddit, 1,619 subscribers on YouTube, and 1,478 followers on LinkedIn! Thank you all for being a part of the journey!
May was pretty fun but June looks to be exciting too. Look out for the Orderbook public testnet release coming soon!
Website| Twitter | TG Chat | TG Announcements | Medium | Youtube | Reddit | Discord | Linkedin | Spanish community | Turkish community | Indian community | Russian community | Chinese community | German community
Bonus highlight
The Polkadex team was able to get together in Bangalore in early May. Here’s a pic of Deepansh, Gautham, and Vivek having a good time.
