Polkadot Project ‘Astar’ (ASTR) Doubles Amid $22 Million Fundraise

Astar Network recently announced it had secured over US$22 million in a fundraising round led by industry-leading crypto companies and angel investors.

Astar Making Waves in DeFi Space

There’s been a lot of movement within the Polkadot ecosystem since the Parachain auctions started in January this year. Hundreds of projects are still competing to secure a slot over the next two years or so.

One of these Polkadot-based projects is Astar Network, a multi-chain DeFi protocol that’s calling the attention of retailers and institutional investors alike due to its wide range of innovative Web3 solutions and financial incentives:

TVL Hits an ATH

The total value locked (TVL) in Astar has reached an all-time high of US$1.3 billion, making it the eighth-largest EVM blockchain. This signals growing interest for the project.

There are now over 100,000+ unique wallet addresses on the ecosystem, a bigger inflow of users, and more decentralised protocols are building on the network, whose TVL now sits at US$1.24 billion.

Astar has been hosting numerous protocols since the launch of its mainnet (there are more than 40+ dApps as of now) and it’s planning to host 15 more in April – a month the project has proclaimed as the “Astar Season”:

Big Steps Ahead For Astar

Astar is an ambitious protocol that aims to create a broad, self-sustaining ecosystem with top-quality dApps and better financial incentives for users and developers. Along with its support for bridges, Astar allows developers to deploy existing Solidity and Polkadot native smart contracts on its network.

The next step for the Astar protocol is to create a multi-chain smart contract hub, which the company says is now in progress: