Acala Network

Acala is building the liquidity layer for web3 finance that is captive and sustainable. It aims to provide infrastructures for HyFi (DeFi+CeFi) solutions with crypto and real-world assets. Acala offers a Universal Asset Hub that hosts multichain liquid staking token (LST) protocols (such as liquid DOT - LDOT), an AMM decentralized exchange, and an app platform that is EVM-compatible and highly customizable (based on Substrate). Acala is secured by Polkadot, and is the liquidity gateway of Polkadot parachains and L1/L2 blockchains.

Acala aims to be a user-friendly, secure, and efficient platform for DeFi applications.

Substrate is very flexible. That allows customizing almost everything, including fee payment logic. Acala built a custom transaction payment pallet that integrates with their DEX pallet for transaction fee handling. This means users can pay fees with any tokens listed in the Acala DEX without holding any native tokens.

Additionally, Substrate allows customizing transaction pools and marking certain transactions as operational, with a higher priority over other transactions. This means Acala can ensure that oracle feed transactions are always highest priority; they are always included at the beginning of the block and therefore avoid the problem of block producers arbitrarily reordering the transactions. Valid oracle feed transactions were also made feeless to reduce the cost of oracle operators. With all those features combined, Acala will be able to have more oracle operators, have the feed transactions included even when the network is congested, and reduce MEV. As a result, the protocols on Acala will be more secure.

Substrate also provides an EVM pallet that allows Acala to support EVM & Solidity smart contracts with Acala’s custom-built EVM+. This means that existing Solidity smart contracts can be ported to the Acala platform with minimal changes, and Solidity developers can develop DeFi applications on Acala with familiar tools and libraries. At the same time, they can still customize the Acala EVM+ to include new features that are not available on other EVM platforms. This will allow Solidity smart contracts to also leverage all the advanced features of Acala as well as the multichain ecosystem of Polkadot.