First Decentralized Exchange Launches on Polkadot and Kusama Ecosystem

Karura Swap opened for trading with $3.4 million in total value locked.

AccessTimeIconJul 23, 2021 at 2:10 p.m. UTC
Updated Sep 14, 2021 at 1:30 p.m. UTC
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The first decentralized exchange on the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem has been launched by Karura, the decentralized finance (DeFi) network of the Acala Foundation.

  • Karura Swap opened for trading with $3.4 million in total value locked, according to an announcement Friday.
  • The exchange's first trading pair is KSM/KAR, formed of the native tokens of Kusama and Karura.
  • Karura Swap will harness a "bootstrap" mechanism as a means of launching a new trading pair in a warm-up mode as a means of achieving liquidity without some of the risks of market manipulation.
  • Trading is temporarily disabled in bootstrap mode until the predetermined liquidity requirements are reached, the announcement said.
  • Karura was announced in June as the first winner of a 48-week lease to build on Kusama, Polkadot's pre-production environment, also known as its "canary" network.
  • Polkadot and other networks like Cosmos and Solana are offering developers a way to avoid the higher costs and increased congestion on Ethereum that have come with the explosion in the DeFi market.

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