DeFi Network Karura Raises $100M Ahead of Kusama's Parachain Auction

Karura, a network offering decentralized finance (DeFi) services to users of the Polkadot and Kusama platforms, has raised 200,000 KSM tokens, equivalent to $100 million, in a crowd loan, the protocol said in a tweet.

The funding is timely because bidding for Kusama’s parachain auction, which will feature projects looking to dive deeper into the Polkadot ecosystem, starts next week. More than 900 addresses on Kraken exchange and more than 8,500 contributors, mostly from Karura’s own portal, chipped in on the funding round. For each KSM, contributors will receive 12 KAR tokens. Loaned KSM tokens can be used once Karura’s parachain lease ends after 48 weeks.

“This level of support for our launch of Karura on Kusama, and later Acala on Polkadot, is proof of the positive demand for interoperable, decentralized financial products,” Ruitao Su, co-founder and CEO of Karura and Acala, said in a press release.

Karura is a token trading application built to provide users with a platform to build and use scalable DeFi applications without large transaction fees and external operations between chains. It is the sister of Acala Network, Polkadot’s main DeFi project.