BlueStar Capital report SatoshiPay’s Amplitude wins parachain auction #42

Blue Star Capital ’s (BLU) investee company SatoshiPay has announced that Pendulum’s sister blockchain Amplitude has won Kusama parachain auction #42.

Winning the parachain auction allows Amplitude to plug into the Kusama network as a parachain for a 48-week lease period and allows developers to start building and using dApps on Amplitude. To participate in the auction, Amplitude successfully completed a ‘crowdloan’, with 24,080 Kusama (“KSM”) tokens from 604 contributors, worth approximately $1.2m, locked for the duration of the lease period. 

The parachain connection will provide users the ability to utilise tokens, for example, for purchases or payment transfers across multiple blockchains providing the “missing link” between fiat and DeFi through a fiat-optimised smart contract blockchain, enabling Fintech and even traditional forex providers to integrate their fiat services with DeFi applications such as specialised forex AMMs, lending protocols and yield farming opportunities.

Alexander Wilke, SatoshiPay’s Chief Executive Officer, commented that: ”The Pendulum ecosystem strategy includes key partnerships with fiat anchors and chain bridges and the incubation of projects in the forex automated market makers and money markets space, along with grant programs for wallets and fintech integrations. The rapid progress of Pendulum and the Polkadot ecosystem may allow us to accelerate our mission to offer instant cross-border payments on blockchain sooner than expected. We are considering several options to further decentralise the DTransfer service and further announcements will be made in due course. For now, SatoshiPay’s focus is laying the foundations not only for DTransfer, but for the whole industry, with Pendulum.“

Derek Lew, Chairman of Blue Star Capital said that: “It is truly exciting to see the pace and scale of the progress Alex and the SatoshiPay team are making right now. The latest news around the Pendulum token pre-sale and other recent developments underline why the board remains confident in the future of this business.”

Pendulum is building the missing link between fiat and DeFi through a fiat-optimised smart contract blockchain based on Polkadot’s Substrate, allowing traditional finance fiat services to integrate with DeFi applications such as specialised forex AMMs, lending protocols or yield farming opportunities. Pendulum is developed by SatoshiPay.

Parachain auctions are those held on the Polkadot and Kusama relay chains to determine which blockchain will connect to available parachain slots to support transactions and provide network security. Amplitude, Pendulum’s sister chain on the Kusama network, already obtained a crowdloan and won a parachain auction. To secure its own parachain slot, Pendulum will need to follow the same procedure on Polkadot.

Crowdloans allow the Pendulum team to crowdsource DOT tokens (for Polkadot slots) and KSM tokens (for Kusama slots) to bootstrap its parachain auction. The process allows people to contribute by agreeing to lock up their own DOT and KSM tokens until the end of the lease period. Auctions and crowdloans raise the bar for blockchain projects, incentivising projects to demonstrate their technology and gain community support prior to launch. More information on parachain auctions can be found at: https://polkadot.network/auctions/