Acala & Manta Team Up On Cross-Chain Bridge, Ensuring Interoperability Between Calamari and Karura
Manta Network has hit another key milestone on its journey to bring private and anonymous transaction capabilities to the Polkadot ecosystem, teaming up with Acala to successfully transfer parachain assets cross-chain. It said the opening a new HRMP channel and deployment of cross-consensus communication ensures privacy and interoperability for assets across both parachains.
The successful test means much tighter integration between Calamari Network, the canary (test) network of Manta Network that’s hosted on Kusama, and Karura, a decentralized finance application on Kusama that allows users to swap, borrow, lend and earn.
Privacy is crucial for Karura as it sees itself as the DeFi hub for the Kusama network. Notably, Karura is the host of one of the most popular stablecoins on Kusama, Acala’s aUSD, which is a multi-collateralized token that’s pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar. Through the cross-chain bridge, Calamari Network delivers the required privacy. It’s a plug-and-play privacy protocol designed to service applications on Kusama. It relies on a technology called zkSNARKS to obfuscate wallet addresses and transaction amounts, ensuring complete anonymity for DeFi users, helping them to avoid being tracked or targeted by hackers.
Manta Chief Operating Officer and co-founder Kenny Li said privacy is paramount to the future development of Web3 infrastructure, and that he was humbled to be playing a role in delivering it.
“Interoperability has always been the name of the game, and this is a big step forward,” he said. “Now crypto assets including Acala’s stablecoin aUSD and KAR can move privately and freely across ecosystems.”
The successful bridge of parachain assets across Calamari and Karura means native asset transfers across the two networks can be privatized in a shielded manner from peer-to-peer, Manta explained. There will be other benefits too. For instance, Calamari’s native KMA token can now exist on Karura, where it can now be used for staking, lending and other DeFi use cases.
Manta said Calamari will continue to work with Karura to integrate and bridge additional parachain assets within the Kusama ecosystem between the two chains, with the aim being to make privacy an integral part of Karura’s DeFi offerings.
Manta and Acala have a history of close collaboration. Back in March, the two projects teamed up with seven other Polkadot parachain teams to create a $250 million aUSD ecosystem fund that’s intended to support promising applications that can boost the adoption and functionality of stablecoins across Polkadot and Kusama.