Akropolis Launches Proof-of-Concept Chain Using Substrate

The Akropolis team launched a Substrate-based chain earlier this year for their DeFi protocol. Akropolis intends to participate in a parachain slot auction after the Polkadot main net launch. As a parachain, they would provide financial services and contracts to other applications in the Polkadot system.

Once launched, the Akropolis chain will enable peer-to-peer, user-owned financial organizations to exchange value regardless of geography and provide core financial services without dependending on banks, governments, or financial institutions (e.g. savings accounts, pooled financial/investment instruments, pooled insurance contracts, alternative pensions solutions, etc.). The Akropolis team has already identified a target user base and hopes that their product will address these needs.

Akropolis recently partnered with ChainX to do joint research on Substrate, on-chain governance, and interoperability between the two chains. Akropolis is also researching applications of zk-SNARKS and LayerX to ensure the privacy of financial transactions within the parachain.

Early contributors to Polkadot, the Akropolis team also runs a validator on Polkadot’s Alexander testnet (PoC-4).

Akropolis also intends to build PolkaHub, infrastructure intended to enable wider developer adoption for Polkadot. Polkahub will significantly lower the barriers to entry to the Polkadot Network by introducing Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for Substrate nodes, inspired by Heroku, aiming to create a one-click service for deploying and running Substrate-based chains. The proposed system enables automatic updates and resource management for running nodes, additionally providing templates for launching parachains. Creating this PaaS solution will allow developers to focus fully on the development of their own parachains or applications, rather than setting up and maintaining infrastructure.

Akropolis believes that programmable money and programmable financial instruments are the future and that domain-specific chains will dominate the ecosystem. As Akropolis CEO Ana Andrianova stated, “Akropolis has been closely following the progress of the Polkadot project. We share the values of technological agnosticism, interoperability, and cross-chain collaboration. Akropolis aims to become a key building block supporting the new, user-centric, crisis-resilient financial ecosystem.”