Equilibrium raises $2.5M to secure support for Polkadot parachain bid

Major Polkadot ecosystem investors are backing the DeFi protocol.

Equilibrium, a Polkadot-based decentralized finance project and parachain candidate, has raised $2.5 million from a number of venture funds primarily involved in the Polkadot ecosystem.

Heavy Polkadot backers like KR1, Signum Capital and Hypersphere Ventures joined Equilibrium’s round. Other participants from the general crypto investment ecosystem include OKEx’s Block Dream Fund, Genesis Block Ventures, CMS Holdings, AU21 Capital, DFG Capital, PNYX Ventures, FBG Capital, LD Capital and others.

The funding round comes as Equilibrium gears up for the upcoming parachain lease auction on Polkadot. The project said that the investment will help secure a parachain slot, which it estimates will require 1 million DOT, currently worth $40 million, committed to the protocol. Though the funds collected by Equilibrium won’t cover the entire sum, the overall support given by major ecosystem players means that the project expects some of the investors to commit a portion of their DOT for Equlibrium’s crowdloan, as CEO Alex Melikhov told Cointelegraph.

Crowdloaning is a token distribution mechanism set to be used by most parachain candidates for the auctions. It relies on DOT holders staking their assets on the parachain’s lease contract, which entitles them to an allocation of the project’s tokens. The mechanism is somewhat similar to liquidity mining on Ethereum, which has become the preferred method for distributing new project tokens in DeFi. The crowdloan is, nevertheless, designed for longer-term commitment, as the staked DOT cannot be withdrawn until the end of the lease period of either 12 or 24 months, depending on the community’s preference.

Equilibrium is one of Polkadot’s DeFi-centric parachain candidates, along with other projects like Acala and Moonbeam. Its flagship product is a MakerDAO-like protocol for generating a collateralized stablecoin. Equilibrium’s protocol introduces innovations such as the bailsmen mechanic, which formalizes the process of liquidating bad debt at a protocol level. The project also hopes to leverage Polkadot’s cross-chain functionality to support a large number of assets.

Equilibrium is currently live as an independent Substrate-based blockchain with an Ethereum bridge. Becoming a parachain remains a key goal for the project, as it would enable fulfilling its full vision of interoperable money markets.

Securing a parachain is also key to enable integrations with other DeFi projects, including a collaboration with Moonbeam and upcoming plans of bringing Curve, a decentralized exchange optimized for wrapped-asset swaps, to its blockchain.