Zeitgeist Integrates Acala’s aUSD Stablecoin

Zeitgeist is delighted to announce a significant partnership with Acala’s Karura Network. Karura was the first project to win a parachain slot on Kusama, and serves as the experimental chain to Acala (built for Polkadot). Karura is the DeFi hub for the Kusama ecosystem and boasts a number of financial primitives including a trustless staking derivative, a decentralized exchange to provide liquidity and power financial innovations, and the one we’re most excited about: the aUSD stablecoin.

The aUSD stablecoin is a decentralized, multi-collateralized stablecoin backed by cross-chain assets, serving as the native stablecoin for the Kusama and Polkadot ecosystem. aUSD is designed to maintain a soft-peg relative to the US Dollar, allowing users to transact, trade, and facilitate services using aUSD while shielding users from price volatility customary to the cryptoasset economy.

Zeitgeist and aUSD

As a platform for prediction markets, Zeitgeist is keenly aware that many of our growing users will come from outside of the blockchain ecosystem. These users will likely be hesitant to participate in our selection of markets due to the risk of volatile crypto price action (whether that be ZTG, KSM, etc. - all are exposed to the volatility of this nascent market).

This is a considerable hurdle to growth for us as a platform because attracting such users will be crucial to our success. It thus makes sense to offer a digital asset pegged to the more traditional US Dollar to ease such users’ concerns. We couldn’t think of a better partner than our friends at the Acala Foundation who are building one of the more prominent DeFi hubs within the Substrate environment.

More Pairs On Zeitgeist

Even though our platform is still in its infancy and numerous facets are still being tweaked, it is planned that our app will interact with user's Substrate wallets (Polkadot.js, Talisman, etc.), and users will then select which token they want to denominate their predictions in. Of course, each new asset offered on our app means a host of new pairs (each market has at least two: ZTG/EGNO and ZTG/EGYES).

Looking at the above example, EGNO represents “*Example Market Prediction Result is NO*”, while EGYES would obviously mean “*Example Market Prediction Result is YES*”. These tokens represent the only outcomes of a binary prediction market that is used to predict the outcome for a question like “Will Donald Trump run for president in 2024?”. There are only two possible outcomes in such a market: Yes or No. Bear in mind that a binary market is only a special case of one of the market types that Zeitgeist supports. The binary market is a categorical market that has only two antithetical outcomes, whereas categorical markets generally can have more than two outcomes.

Our Beta App (launched in 2021) only operated with a single native asset, ZBS (Zeitgeist Battery Station - the testnet token), with each possible market outcome being denominated against it. But with the introduction of even **one** more asset into our ecosystem, the entire ecosystem's economy increases substantially. This is caused by the addition of one extra liquidity pool per market that covers the outcome-currency pairs for aUSD, like aUSD/EGNO and aUSD/EGYES (in addition to the ZTG/EGNO and ZTG/EGYES etc.). This should ultimately lead to more liquidity in each market.

We're excited about tackling these engineering challenges. Not only do we have a remarkable dev and economics team, but partnering with a team like those at the Acala Foundation makes life a lot less stressful! The Foundation has some of the best economists and Substrate devs in the industry, and their expertise will be invaluable as we collaborate in bringing aUSD to the Zeitgeist application.

We’re confident that users are going to find the availability of a stablecoin on our app to be incredibly beneficial. Whether they be crypto enthusiasts or entirely new to the ecosystem, the ability to move into a pegged stablecoin will be hugely useful to vigilant market participants.

More Zeitgeist Onramps

Furthermore, this partnership will help us immensely in our quest to open free-flowing gateways to our environment. The Karura DEX will be a pivotal platform for users to get funds to our app in order to take part in the numerous markets, where users will be able to access their KSM on the Karura app, swap it for ZTG or aUSD, and send those assets directly to the Zeitgeist app.

While we aim to grow the number of gateways and on-ramps coming into the Zeitgeist ecosystem, we’re excited to have the Acala Foundation as one of our pivotal partners at launch. We appreciate their support in the development of our application, and look forward to seeing aUSD on our platform!

Keep an eye on our blog and social media channels, where we will be putting out tutorials on how to transfer aUSD to our app, how to participate in markets, along with a host of other helpful content.

In the meantime, check out the big announcement from Acala about their new $250 million aUSD fund!