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

• Karura Swap has 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.