Morning News | Acala launches a $250 million aUSD ecosystem fund; The Graph announces R&D roadmap

Organizer: Richard Lee, Chain Catcher

"What important news has emerged in the past 12 hours?"

1. Uncollateralized loan protocol Union Finance launches governance token UNION, 2% allocated for airdrop

Ethereum uncollateralized loan protocol Union Finance has announced the launch of the token UNION, the establishment of a DAO organization, and the release of the airdrop claim address. According to the announcement, the total issuance of UNION is 1 billion tokens, with 20% allocated to the community DAO, 46.78% to founders and future teams, and 33.22% to early supporters. Among these, 2% (2 million tokens) will be airdropped to early users of the protocol.

According to the rules, two groups of users are eligible for the airdrop, including participants of the "Demo Net" testnet and users with relevant ARCx credit scores. Participants who are members of the Demo Net on Polygon can receive 5,000 tokens; if a user is in default at the time of the snapshot, 500 tokens will be deducted; users with a ring NFT at the time of the snapshot will receive an additional 3,141 tokens; additionally, users can earn 100 UNION tokens for each collateral certificate they hold or for guaranteeing others' certificates.

Furthermore, if an address has a governance score above 10 on Index Coop or a score above 93 on the CryptoCoven Hodl Score at the time of the snapshot, that address will also qualify for 2,004 UNION tokens.

It is reported that Union Finance is an open and permissionless credit protocol currently operating on the Ethereum mainnet and Arbitrum. In December 2020, Union.finance raised $3 million in funding, with investors including 1kx, Defiance, and others. (Union Finance)
2. Polkadot DeFi protocol Acala teams up with 9 parachain teams to launch a $250 million aUSD ecosystem fund
Polkadot DeFi protocol Acala has announced the launch of a $250 million aUSD ecosystem fund in collaboration with 9 Polkadot parachain teams and several venture funds to support early-stage startups building applications with strong stablecoin use cases on any Polkadot or Kusama parachain. The fund is seeking applications based on Solidity or Substrate to drive the yield or utility of aUSD, including lending markets, DEXs, derivatives, asset management, DAOs, payments, and other use cases.
The Polkadot parachains participating in this ecosystem fund include Acala, Astar Network, Centrifuge, Efinity, HydraDX, Manta, Moonbeam, OriginTrail, Parallel, and Zeitgeist. Nearly 40 venture capital firms are involved, including 1confirmation, Alamda, Hashkey, DCG, IOSG, Jump Crypto, Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital, and others. (Source link)

3. Former Polychain partner launches $125 million crypto venture fund "dao5" and plans to transition to DAO format
Former Polychain partner Tekin Salimi has launched a $125 million crypto venture fund called "dao5," which will provide funding of approximately $500,000 to $2 million for seed and pre-seed rounds.

Additionally, Salimi plans to transition the fund to a DAO by 2025, where DAO5 tokens will be minted and distributed to the fund's investment team, advisory committee, and founders of portfolio companies. The legal entity constituting the fund will be dissolved, and the assets of the general partners will be permanently transferred to an on-chain treasury owned and managed by DAO5 token holders. (Source link)

4. Blockchain open-source software platform Tea completes $8 million seed round financing, led by Binance Labs
Tea has completed an $8 million seed round financing, led by Binance Labs, with participation from XBTO Humla Ventures, Lattice Capital, DARMA Capital, Coral DeFi, Woodstock, Rocktree, SVK Crypto, and MAKE Group.

It is reported that Tea is a new company building an open-source software platform on the blockchain, representing a significant evolution of traditional open-source software, allowing volunteer developers to be compensated and participate in open governance. Tea co-founder and CEO Max Howell is known for creating Homebrew (also known as "brew"), one of the most widely contributed open-source software programs globally. (Source link)

5. Cryptocurrency wallet Bitcoin.com announces the issuance of reward and utility token Verse
The cryptocurrency wallet and browser Bitcoin.com has announced the issuance of the reward and utility token Verse, with a total supply of 21 billion, to be distributed over 7 years, based on the ERC-20 format. Of this, 35% is allocated to the ecosystem, including liquidity mining, staking, airdrops, etc.; 34% is allocated for infrastructure development; 15% is allocated to the team; and 16% will be publicly sold.

Since 2015, Bitcoin.com has helped users create 29 million wallets, with over 5 million monthly active users, and also provides cryptocurrency trading, blockchain explorer, news, and other services. (Source link)

6. The Graph announces latest R&D roadmap and establishes 5 working groups

The Graph has announced its R&D roadmap, which includes significant improvements to indexing performance and streaming architecture using Firehose, support for new data sources and chains, providing SNARK proofs for scalable state channels and verifiable queries, upgrading the Delegator and Curator mechanisms, layer 2 scaling, more gateways, improvements to the subgraph developer experience, and optimization of indexing tools to meet the data needs of dapp developers and consumers.

To this end, The Graph has established 5 working groups, including Data and API, SNARK Force, Protocol Economics, Protocol and Network Operations, and Indexer Experience.

The Graph is the indexing and querying layer of web3. Developers build and publish open APIs called subgraphs, which applications can query using GraphQL. The Graph currently supports indexing data from 31 different networks. (Source link)

7. a16z proposes new utility functions for MKR tokens and updates token economics in MakerDAO governance forum
The a16z team has released a proposal in the MakerDAO governance forum, suggesting innovations to the MKR token economics model, specifically including three proposals.

The first is to create new utility functions for MKR tokens, such as implementing incentives supporting MKR for certain auctions within MakerDAO; the second is to increase voter participation and consistency by providing greater operational flexibility to core units through a new MKR allocation bonus system for representatives and voters, reducing voting requirements; the third is to increase the system surplus buffer, beginning to align it with expected losses related to credit and liquidation risks specific to the vault, serving as MakerDAO's primary insurance pool.

a16z also stated that it will abstain from voting related to this proposal to ensure that no party has undue influence or any potential conflicts of interest during the governance process. (Source link)

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