Parallel Finance — October 2021 Updates

Hi everyone! Parallel has great news to share:

1. *Milestone reached* We have officially secured the tenth Kusama parachain slot in early October. This was an important milestone for us, as it enables us to launch Heiko on the Kusama network. After our crowdloan was completed and we won a parachain slot, Heiko is producing blocks on the network. We are now in the process of preparing for our Heiko mainnet launch. This involves several phases to ensure we maintain stability during each deployment; going from enabling basic functionalities to full platform capabilities after the necessary development, runtime upgrades, testing, and technical verifications.
2. *Series A extension* — More to come on this shortly! ;)
3. *Hiring Progress* — Offers accepted for 3 critical roles: Head of Finance, Senior QA Engineer, Marketing Advisor
4. *Next milestone* We will be participating in the first Polkadot Parachain Auctions and actively raising for our crowdloan. Parallel is targeting 20M DOT, and we need all our community’s support for the parachain bid. This is crucial for us to launch on the Polkadot network. Support us — we will be giving out generous rewards and bonuses. See below.

Product Updates

1. Parallel crowdloan

• Polkadot has announced the dates for the very first batch of the parachain auction slots. We will be bidding in the upcoming auctions for a maximum slot lease of two years. Auctions officially begin on November 11, 2021, and Parallel will be enabling early contributions starting the week of November 2, 2021. Check out this video where Yubo, Founder and CEO, talks about the crowdloan reward structure: https://youtu.be/fZmkUTID1OI
• Our waitlist is open for the community, over 10+K users have already indicated their interest. Register here: https://parallel.fi/polkadot/parachain-auction-waitlist.html
• PARA tokenomics — we’re designing our reward structure and strategy for allocating our native token to our community (details will be published over the next few days).

2. Heiko launch on Kusama network

• Development is in progress for the scanner features, vesting client, claim modules, and runtime upgrades.
• Once we launch, we will begin distributing HKO to our community who supported us in the Heiko crowdloan. The vesting will begin and users can claim the tokens for usage on our platform.
• The Money Market product launched on October 28, 2021. The community testing and planning will begin shortly. This will be done through a phased approach where we allow a small starting cap and gradually increase as we monitor for bugs and stability over the weeks. This will allow our users to test and provide feedback on our money market and staking products.

3. Auction loan product launch

• Users will be able to participate in Kusama and Polkadot crowdloans through Parallel. This product is important to the ecosystem because it increases the diversity of contributors to crowdloans and helps projects with liquidity needs in attaining a parachain slot.
• Moreover, our product enables early liquidity through our cDOT/ cKSM tokens. Each DOT/ KSM contributed through our platform will enable users to receive derivative assets that can be used in our money market. By using Parallel’s platform to contribute to the Kusama and Polkadot crowdloans, users are also incentivized with additional bonuses on top of the base rewards.

4. Security audit

• We are seeing great progress with SegFault and Halborn. We are working through the resolution of improvement areas from the preliminary audit reports.

Community

Growth

• Twitter — 34.2+K Followers, 32% MoM growth from Sept’21 to Oct’21
• Telegram — 6.9+K Followers, 26% MoM growth from Sept’21 to Oct’21
• Discord — 29.6+K Followers, 41% MoM growth from Sept’21 to Oct’21

Partnerships

• In preparation for our Auction loan product launch, we are partnering with some of the biggest Polkadot builders to enable greater benefits to projects trying to secure a slot and better incentives for the community.
• We’ve confirmed our partners: Astar, Litentry, Manta Network

Upcoming

October 2021 has been a prolific month with winning a Kusama parachain slot and we look forward to continuing the momentum as we prepare for the upcoming Polkadot auctions.

Watch out for announcements on early contributions for the Polkadot crowdloans, additional bonuses will be given to our community through our auction loan platform — Stay tuned!