This past weekend saw the official launch of five parachains on the Polkadot network.
The parachains that went live this weekend (Acala, Astar, Clover, Moonbeam and Parallel Finance) were chosen after successful parachain auctions.
During the auction period, in total, the five projects secured nearly 99 million DOTs, worth approximately $2.4 billion. The winning projects effectively lease their parachain spaces, which last for 96 weeks.
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According to the statement shared by the Polkadot team:
"The launch of parachains on Polkadot represents the culmination of the original vision outlined in the Polkadot Whitepaper (aka the Polkadot Paper) in 2016. The Polkadot Paper outlined Polkadot's core features and sketched out the network's sharded multichain design. Parachains are the final piece of core functionality, as outlined in the paper, to be fully launched. How Polkadot evolves from here is up to its community of DOT holders, who will approve any future upgrades via the network's on-chain governance system."
The winning projects focus on a range of use cases, including decentralized finance and lending, among others.