Acala, Anchor Protocol team up to unite Terra, Polkadot Ecosystems

Anchor Protocol, a savings and borrowing protocol built on Terra blockchain, entered a partnership with Acala, a DeFi network built on Polkadot, to increase liquidity and yield opportunities to both the Polkadot and Terra DeFi ecosystems.

Growing the decentralized stablecoins for aUSD and UST will enable all the projects within both ecosystems to harness increased opportunities offered through decentralized finance. Terra is being used at scale as collateral for the second-largest crypto collateralized stablecoin UST, which now sits at $7.2 billion in market capitalization. 

Meanwhile, Acala recently announced a $250 million ecosystem fund that aims to accelerate the development of DApps that use its stablecoin, Acala USD (aUSD), on Polkadot. Polkadot is an interoperability network that connects many application-specific blockchains, dubbed parachains. 

The aUSD stablecoin lies at the heart of Acala’s DeFi offerings. It can be minted using collateral tokens on the Polkadot blockchain, including Polkadot (DOT), Kusama (KSM), Acala (ACA), and Karura (KAR), and then be staked for yield.

Acala and Karura — Acala’s Kusama-based parachain — will initially help expand Anchor’s collateral options for the UST stablecoin with Liquid DOT (LDOT) and Liquid KSM (LKSM), Acala’s yield-bearing liquid staking derivatives. 

Bringing together the Dotsama and Terra ecosystems 

Polkadot and Kusama users will soon be able to access Anchor yield using their LKSM and LDOT by first transferring their liquid staking assets to Terra via Wormhole, then providing their LDOT or LKSM as collateral to borrow UST on Anchor. This functionality will introduce a whole new group of  Dotsama (Polkadot and Kusama) users to the Terra ecosystem.

aUSD is native to the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem, meaning it can be transferred cross-chain to any parachain or dApp in the ecosystem with zero trust or bridge risk. Furthermore, as the default trading and routing asset of the Polkadot ecosystem, aUSD will give UST users a gateway into the Polkadot ecosystem to leverage their UST or aUST for further yield opportunities.

Acala and Anchor intend to create UST/aUSD pools, initially on Acala, and then later expand to multiple other parachains and Layer 1’s. The pools will significantly enhance the liquidity for aUSD and UST while enabling collaborative efforts to grow the decentralized stablecoin space.

The teams will also work together to stand up deep liquidity pools for aUSD and UST on Acala, serving as a gateway into the Polkadot ecosystem for UST users. 

As DeFi lending grows in popularity, earning above-average yields will be on the minds of participating investors. Partnering to provide increased access to Stablecoins across both ecosystems is a way for Acala and Anchor to offer higher returns.

Wormhole cross-chain interoperability

The announcement follows recent news that Acala and Karura will connect Polkadot and Kusama to the Wormhole Multi-Chain Bridge. Wormhole’s cross-chain interoperability will enable Karura and Acala users to leverage cross-chain assets and access over $200 billion of liquidity from leading layer-1 networks. 

Using Wormhole’s cross-platform and shared liquidity, Acala and Karura will enjoy connections to high-value layer-1 networks supported by Wormhole, including Ethereum, Avalanche, Solana, Fantom, and Polygon, Oasis, and Terra. 

The two teams will continue to build more integrations and deployments in the Acala and Terra ecosystems, using these initial integrations as a foundation.