The first 5 projects winning Polkadot Parachain auctions, Acala, Astar, Clover, Moonbeam, and Parallel Finance were officially launched on the network.
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They are focused on DeFi and will serve to enhance Polkadot’s scalability. In the blog post published on Dec. 18, the Polkadot team said that the launched projects had collected over $2.4 bln (99 M DOT) together.Parachains has been a part of Polkadot's initial vision and they can be found in the Whitepaper presented in 2016. It says parachains make the protocol fully functional.
Polkadot had been preparing for the launch for around 5 years, during which it was researching and developing the system. Polkadot’s Genesis block went live in May, 2020.
As stated, Parachain auctions will continue. The next 6 winners will be released on May 11, 2022. Polkadot aims to have 100 parallel chains in general. They will help the network to increase its scalability. Further plans include expanding the network's capabilities. A part of this is parathreads, which will enable parachains to join the protocol on a pay-per-block system.
Polkadot celebrated the event online and broadcasted the party on Twitter.
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DOT, the native coin of Polkadot, currently trades at around $23, more than 50% down from its all-time high of $55, reached on November 4, 2021. The coin is the 11th largest crypto by market cap.