coindesk.com
Aventus Network, a fast and inexpensive Ethereum overlay using elements of public and permissioned blockchains, has buddied up with crypto investor Scytale Ventures in a bid to snag a parachain slot on the interconnected Polkadot blockchain ecosystem.
The Aventus partnership with Scytale Ventures includes a sizable grant of DOT, the native token of the Polkadot network. The value of DOT contributed by the VC was not disclosed; Scytale’s Horizon Fund II took a significant position in the native token of Aventus (AVT) as a vote of confidence in the project. Aventus has been around since 2017.
The auction process to win Polkadot parachain slots saw its first cohort of projects gather billions of dollars worth of DOT late last year, much of it from community-based crowdloans that staked tokens behind a slew of startups.
As well as exploring decentralized finance (DeFi) and more, Ethereum bridges and connectivity solutions already exist within the Polkadot system; one of the first and most high-value parachain auctions was won by Moonbeam, for instance, which brings Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility to Polkadot.
There’s an important distinction between the two projects, said Aventus CEO Alan Vey, since Moonbeam is more focused on general-purpose computing, while Aventus is “a bit more of a walled garden, a more performant environment, but less general-purpose.” It may be one of Polkadot’s first takes on “enterprise blockchain.”
Moonbeam allows users to write smart contracts and deploy the same kind of code that runs on Ethereum. “With Aventus, you can’t do that, you need to build what are called ‘pallets,’ which are essentially code that the whole network has to approve before it’s deployed,” said Vey. “So it’s two different technical ways of coming at the same solution.”
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Now that the auction process has been up and running for some time, the amount of DOT required to snag a parachain slot is in the millions of dollars. In terms of timing for an auction, Vey said it depends partly on the existing Aventus network (which was built using Substrate, Polkadot’s open source framework) being migrated over to the parachain, as opposed to simply launching there, like most of the other projects.
As such, a possible auction would probably happen around the end of Q2 or in early Q3, he said.
“We launched in production with that tech last February and started building and did a bunch of interesting client deals,” said Vey. “Transactions have been growing and delivering for our stakers, and most recently we listed on Coinbase. So there’s been a lot of momentum.”