First Decentralized Exchange Launches on Polkadot and Kusama Ecosystem

Karura Swap opened for trading with $3.4 million in total value locked.

Jul 23, 2021 at 2:10 p.m. UTC

Updated Sep 14, 2021 at 1:30 p.m. UTC

The first decentralized exchange on the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem has been launched by Karura, the decentralized finance (DeFi) network of the Acala Foundation.

Karura Swap opened for trading with $3.4 million in total value locked, according to an announcement Friday.
The exchange's first trading pair is KSM/KAR, formed of the native tokens of Kusama and Karura.
Karura Swap will harness a "bootstrap" mechanism as a means of launching a new trading pair in a warm-up mode as a means of achieving liquidity without some of the risks of market manipulation.
Trading is temporarily disabled in bootstrap mode until the predetermined liquidity requirements are reached, the announcement said.
Karura was announced in June as the first winner of a 48-week lease to build on Kusama, Polkadot's pre-production environment, also known as its "canary" network.
Polkadot and other networks like Cosmos and Solana are offering developers a way to avoid the higher costs and increased congestion on Ethereum that have come with the explosion in the DeFi market.

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