March 23, 2022 — Hello everyone. This is Sota Watanabe, founder of Astar Network. After successfully launching our mainnet two months ago, I’m happy to say that the Astar ecosystem has been growing at an extremely rapid pace and is currently exceeding our own ambitious expectations. In this article, I’ll be sharing updates from the past two months.
Total Value Locked Growth
The most important metric for layer 1 blockchains is Total Value Locked, or TVL for short. TVL represents the total amount of assets locked in various DeFi applications’ smart contracts. The more TVL a network has, the higher the valuation should be. That’s because locking tokens means reducing the circulation supply, thus putting upward pressure on the price. I’m thrilled to share that we have been seeing tremendous TVL growth in Astar Network in the past 2 months.
According to DeFi Llama, the most reputable DeFi TVL monitoring tool, Astar’s TVL has hit $900M+ at the time of writing and it owns roughly 45% of all Polkadot Parachains’ total TVL.
Furthermore, as you can see in the diagram, TVL growth is looking very strong and has been on a rapid upward trajectory. We have bridged $180M+ worth of Ethereum assets to Polkadot through Astar. ArthSwap ($120M TVL) and Starlay ($200M TVL) are leading the growth. Currently, Astar is the # 1 chain in terms of bringing assets from outside of the Polkadot ecosystem, and both the biggest smart contract DEX and smart contract lending platform are built on Astar.
I’m proud of my team, our community, and our partners for helping us to achieve these impressive feats in the short amount of time that we have been live as a blockchain. Still, a lot more work remains to be done.
Partnerships and Investments
We disclosed a $22M fundraise led by Polychain one month ago and Coinbase Ventures joined our strategic round. I am very excited to be backed by all major tier 1 exchanges and industry leaders.
In addition to that, Microsoft joined our incubation program as a sponsor. As part of this collaboration, Microsoft and Astar Network will work together on the Astar Incubation Program. Microsoft will provide a wide range of resources, including marketing support and a mentorship network to select startups in the Astar Incubation Program to help them succeed in the global market.
Ecosystem Projects
My favorite Twitter account, Polkadot Nation, made amazing diagrams that show our ecosystem DeFi projects.
Currently, we have more than 10 Astar native DeFi projects and these projects will be live on Astar in the coming weeks. We intentionally started with DeFi but NFT use cases are also coming. Today, we are very lucky to see some community DAO-driven NFT projects like Astar Degens. In the coming weeks, some fantastic updates will be disclosed. Stay tuned for that.
Team
Our core team is also expanding. Last year, the number of core team members was less than 10. Today, we have 30+ members gathered from 12 different countries. Some members came from Web3 Foundation, Parity Technologies, and other great teams like ConsenSys and World Economic Forum. We believe that great teams make great products, and the most important thing is teamwork and a shared vision. I’m confident that we have that in place.
Closing Thoughts
We are on the right track to make the most robust smart contract hub on Polkadot in 2022. Our ecosystem is growing faster than ever before and we will unlock the full potential of WebAssembly smart contracts in the coming months (our testnet started supporting WebAssembly this month). Our goal is to keep the momentum and accelerate DeFi and NFT use cases in Q2 to become the # 1 WASM and EVM smart contract hub on Polkadot in 2022.
About Astar Network
Astar Network is the #1 Smart Contract Hub for WASM + EVM on Polkadot. Since winning its Parachain auction in January 2022, Astar Network has become the top Parachain in the Polkadot ecosystem in terms of Total Value Locked ($900M) and most Ethereum assets transferred over ($180M). Astar Network is the leading smart contract hub that connects the Polkadot ecosystem to Ethereum, Cosmos, and all major layer 1 blockchains. Astar Network supports dApps using multiple virtual machines — namely WASM and EVM — and offers the best technology solutions and financial incentives via its Build2Earn and Astar Incubation Program for Web3 developers to build on top of a secure, scalable and interoperable blockchain.
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Monthly Update of Astar Network was originally published in Astar Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
