# Acala Stablecoin Network by Acala Foundation Acala Foundation nurtures and stewards applications in the fields of decentralized finance protocols particularly those that can serve as open finance building blocks such as stable currency. Acala Stablecoin Network is a focal R&D project initiated by the Acala Foundation. The Acala Foundation is founded by [Laminar](https://laminar.one/) and [Polkawallet](https://polkawallet.io/) both of whom are contributors to the Polkadot ecosystem. The Acala Foundation aims to broaden its membership and industry participants as we progress. ## Project Description We are building a decentralized, multi-collateralized, cross-chain, community-owned stablecoin system - the Acala Network, to enable true economic interoperability and scalability. Along with the system, we are also building an economic model and governance framework to sustain the development, and continuous participation in the Polkadot ecosystem (e.g. as parachain or parathread), until ultimately transitioning the network to community ownership. The Acala Network will serve as a building block for other DeFi applications, such as Laminar Flowchain, and will provide new use cases for quality assets in the Polkadot ecosystem, such as DOT and XBTC from ChainX. The Acala Network will include the following parts * An economic model for the Acala Network and IPO plan etc. * The first stablecoin product: 1 Acala Dollar = 1 US Dollar * Acala chain using Substrate to enable multi-collateral Acala Dollar including the following modules: * The Token module with multi-currency support and the Oracle module from the [Open Runtime Library (ORML)](https://github.com/laminar-protocol/open-runtime-module-library), which we are developing and are open-sourced for the community to use and build upon * Various modules specific to manage collateral debt positions, risks, auctions, governance, etc. * Acala Network SDKs: to empower developer community to build upon and integrate with the Acala Network * Acala dApp: integrate with selected Polkadot wallet, to enable minting Acala Dollars, managing debt positions, and governance, etc. ## Team members This project is a collaboration of Laminar and Polkawallet through the Acala Foundation. The project team consists of members from both parties. **Team Polkawallet** * Fuyao Jiang (Co-CEO) * Yuzhu Liu (Collaboration | Full-time) * Jianjiang Wang (Rust developer | Full-time) * Hao Qiu (Full-stack developer | Full-time) * Xiaoxuan Yang (PR | Full-time) * Full-time full-stack developer - hiring **Team Laminar** * Ruitao Su (Co-CEO) * Bryan Chen (Advisor & Architect | Part-time) * Bette Chen (Operations & Product | Part-time) * Antonia Chen (Chief Economist | Part-time) * Shaun Wang (Rust developer | Full-time) * Full-time Rust developer - hiring * Full-time Front-end developer - hiring ## Team Website * https://acala.network ## Legal Structure The legal structure of the Acala Foundation is being set up in Singapore. Meanwhile, the two teams are under legal agreement for collaboration. ## Team's experience **Team Polkawallet** * Fuyao is the founder of Polkawallet. He is an early Polkadot community member, who has taken the Polkawallet project from inception to implementation. He was Polkadot's early Chinese community organizer, community opinion leader, and Polkadot evangelist, who has spent over 8,000 hours in community building and development. * Jianjiang holds a Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering from Sichuan University. He has 4-years of experience in blockchain core development. He was formerly a senior engineer at Meituan, a core developer at Hashgard public chain, and Cosmos contributor. He is Substrate Framework early researcher. * Yuzhu has a Master's degree in Social Science from MSU. He previously worked at the Bank of the Russian Federation & EverBright Securities Investment. He once led the Entrepreneur Trade Promotion Association between China and Russia, with trade volume exceeding 100 million RMB. He was also former Supply Chain Financial Products Manager at China Entrepreneur Association. * Hao is a senior blockchain full-stack development engineer. He is also a Substrate runtime developer. Formerly Hashgard core developer. He is proficient in distributed financial blockchain development. * Xiaoxuan has 4-years of PR experience and marketing operations. She is proficient in finance, and IT. She holds a Master's degree from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. She was former project content operations and PR manager at Qtum, responsible for brand planning, content planning, event management, and growth. She is experienced in maintaining media resources and relations, monitoring media analytics and handling PR events. **Team Laminar** * Ruitao has decades of successful software and app development experience (with awards from Apple, NZ HiTech, and others). He is co-founder and CEO of Laminar. In the past few years, as Centrality's CTO, he has successfully delivered decentralized token token generation platforms (https://tgeapp.com) raised over $300+ million worth of Ether, developed next-gen blockchain platform, built various smart contracts, protocols, and first-of-its-kind dApps. He has also built various partnership including financial institutes to support Laminar's mission. * Bryan (his GitHub handle [xlc](https://github.com/xlc) should be very familiar to you) is a core contributor to substrate codebase, a Polkadot community ambassador, and Substrate/Polkadot lecturer at `YiKuaiLianXi`. He is co-founder and CTO of Laminar He has extensive experience as a full-stack developer, and was previously blockchain architect at Centrality.ai leading charge of core blockchain and associated services development (https://github.com/cennznet). He graduated from the University of Auckland with a Bachelor of Engineering specializing in Software. * Bette has more than a decade product/program/project management experience (with various company awards) in software and high-tech industry. She is co-founder and COO of Laminar. She was previously Product Manager at Centrality, led the development of PoS public blockchain, various protocols including dex, identity & permission, asset management, etc and built a decentralized ecosystem (https://github.com/cennznet, https://cennznetdocs.com/, https://www.onfinality.io/). She graduated from the University of Auckland with a Bachelor of Engineering specializing in Software, and an MBA from the University of Otago and Duke Fuqua School of Business. * Dr. Antonia Chen holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Auckland. She is co-founder and chief-economist of Laminar. She has over a decade of experience in tech startups, Microeconomics and the Mathematical Social Science research field. She has previously designed a dual-token economic model for a public blockchain. She has presented her work at various international conferences. She advises the Laminar team about anything economics and modeling. * Shaun Wang ([shaopengw](https://github.com/shaopengw)) has been contributing to several Polkadot ecosystem open source libraries, including Substrate, parity-common, type-metadata, etc. He has solid software engineering experience and was a core developer in Centrality blockchain team. He was a core member of the runner-up team JOSS at first Polkadot/Substrate hackathon. ## Team Code Repos * [Acala Network documentation and implementation](https://github.com/AcalaNetwork/Acala) * [Open Runtime Module Library](https://github.com/laminar-protocol/open-runtime-module-library) * [Economic Whitepaper](https://github.com/AcalaNetwork/Acala-white-paper/blob/master/ACALA_Token_Economy_Working_Paper_4Nov2019.pdf) * [The Honzon Protocol documentation](https://github.com/AcalaNetwork/Acala/wiki) ## Team LinkedIn Profiles **Team Polkawallet** * [Fuyao Jiang](https://www.linkedin.com/in/%E5%AF%8C%E8%80%80-%E5%A7%9C-599609159/) * [Jianjiang Wang](https://www.linkedin.com/in/%E5%81%A5%E6%B1%9F-%E7%8E%8B-95859210b/) * [Yuzhu Liu](https://www.linkedin.com/in/%E7%8E%89%E6%9F%B1-%E5%88%98-b31903191/) **Team Laminar** * [Ruitao Su](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruitaosu/) * [Bryan Chen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/xiliang-chen-1ba8ba52/) * [Bette Chen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/bette-chen/) * [Shaun Wang](https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaopeng-wang/) * [Dr. Antonia Chen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonia-chen-5945221b/) ## Team Github Profiles **Team Polkawallet** * Fuyao Jiang: https://github.com/jiangfuyao * Jianjiang Wang: https://github.com/wangjj9219 * Hao Qiu: https://github.com/qwer951123 **Team Laminar** * Ruitao Su: https://github.com/rsu * Bryan Chen: https://github.com/xlc * Bette Chen: https://github.com/bette7 * Antonia Chen: https://github.com/Antonia-Chen * Shaun Wang: https://github.com/shaopengw ## Development Roadmap `The Acala Network MVP` will be a 3-month project, aims to deliver a running Substrate chain testnet providing multi-collateralized stable US Dollars - the Acala Dollar, with basic (council type) governance. Upon the testnet launch, we will implement a basic version of its economic model and work towards an Initial Parachain Offering. Participation in the IPO auction will depend upon the readiness of the Polkadot network. * **M1: Economic model, governance design, and IPO plan + technical design (2 weeks)** - we will create and publish relevant whitepapers - R&D multi-collateral Acala Dollar protocol based on Substrate and Polkadot, we will publish technical spec and runtime module designs - dApp UX design * **M2: Implementation of Oracle, Multi-Currency Token, and Auction modules (2 weeks)** - we will publish these modules under the Open Runtime Library - `token`: while the balance module handles the native token on the Acala Network, the token module supports additional multiple assets on the chain, to manage balance and transfer tokens. - `currencies`: makes the Acala Network a multi-currency chain by aggregating the srml-balances and orml-tokens - `oracle`: is an implementation of DataProvider, and a common price feeding module, storing incoming price in a key/value map. - `prices`: provides the price for an asset in chosen base currency; it uses asset prices in USD from DataProvider - `auction`: is a common auction interface for bidding on an item. How a particular auction is performed and settled is managed by individual implementation of AuctionHandler - we will use and develop Acala specific implementation such as AuctionHandler - we will deploy oracle servers and set up monitoring services - all runtime modules in this and following milestones will be shipped with unit tests - we will deliver a running chain with these modules, docker image to set up an Acala node, an SDK library, and a tutorial using this protocol * **M3: Implementation of stablecoin specific modules (4 weeks)** - we will implement runtime modules to support the main functionalities - `honzon`: is the proxy module that users will interact with for stablecoin functionalities such as create, update and transfer CDPs - `cdp_engine`: manages auctions, risks (to enforce stability fees, collateral ratio, debt ceiling, debt to asset ratio etc.), and liquidation - `auction_manager`: implements AuctionHandler and handles collateral, surplus and deficit auctions, manages auction parameters such as increment size, and duration etc. - `cdp`: manages maps of debt positions for accounts and collaterals, updates debt positions by updates aUSD balance via the debit module, and updates collateral balances - `debits`: accounts for debt balance for a given collateral when a loan or cdp is created/updated/closed, based on collateral to aUSD exchange rate; it also takes into account of stability fee (or interest rate) and updates the debit exchange ratio every period (e.g. every block) - `other modules`: primitives module defines constants such as collateral currencies supported, support module for defining types - we will deliver a running chain with these modules, docker image to set up an Acala node, an SDK library, and a tutorial using this protocol * **M4: Implementation of basic economic model and governance (2 weeks)** - we will implement runtime modules for basic economic model and governance - basic economic model: implement ACA network token for paying transaction fee, for paying stability fee, and as auction asset in case of insufficient collaterals - basic governance: set up the `council` module for a federated voting process with whitelisted council members - we will perform runtime upgrade on testnet to include these functionalities, and provide relevant documentation for the community - we will deliver a running chain with these modules, docker image to set up an Acala node, an SDK library, and a tutorial using this protocol * **M5: Implement the Acala dApp, integrate all parts, and documentation (4 weeks)** - we will implement a web dApp to include these features: create CDP to generate Acala dollar, manage positions, and simple governance - we will deliver a working web application with these features, and a tutorial to use it - The code for this project will be available publicly and a docker image will be available for download - we will launch testnet with all parts integrated, provide documentation and tutorials to end-users and developers to use the dApp and SDKs **Scope of Delivery** `The Acala Network MVP` testnet will be an independent chain, with the functionalities specified above, without depending on inter-chain communication protocol nor Cumulus. The testnet can use our multi-currency module to mint test collateral assets such as BTC/ETH/DOT to simulate bridging or cross-chain assets. The following items are **out of scope** of this grant application but remain as objectives of the full (production) Acala project plan, they will be implemented once the dependent components are ready - enable cross-chain aUSD - make assets from other networks available on Acala network: other parachains or other blockchains - participate in IPO and joining Polkadot as parachain **Dependent Components (ideal to have but not compulsory)** - the inter-chain communication protocol for Polkadot is available, and a cross-chain token standard is formalized - Cumulus is ready to run parachain collector nodes - ideally, the Ethereum bridge is available to bring Ethereum assets to Acala Network as collaterals ## Additional Information * Work has been done so far 1. We are drafting and verifying the economic model of the Acala Network, please see links in the Team Code Repos section for more details 2. We are drafting technical specification and design of runtime modules 3. We are building common runtime modules such as multi-asset token that will be used in the Acala Stablecoin Network project * Are there any teams who have already contributed (financially) to the project? So far this project is funded by Laminar and Polkawallet. * Have you applied for other grants so far? Laminar and Polkawallet had previously received grants from Web3 respectively. But Acala Foundation or Acala Stablecoin Network project has not received other grants. * Are there any other projects similar to yours? If so, how is your project different? MakerDAO's v2 multi-collateral DAI would be a reference implementation for decentralized stablecoin. While we are inspired by many aspects of the MakerDAO project, the Acala Network will deliver a cross-chain solution, with a unique economic model to eventually evolve into a community-owned network in the Polkadot ecosystem, and will leverage Substrate's unique properties for implementation. * Open Source License: We will use Apache 2.0.