KR1 plc - Investment Update: Acala Network

24 November 2021

KR1 plc

("KR1" or the "Company")

Investment Update: Acala Network

KR1 plc (KR1:AQSE), a leading digital asset investment company, is pleased to announce the Company’s participation in the Acala (“ACA”) crowdloan and Polkadot (“DOT”) parachain auction. KR1 contributed a total of 350,000.00 DOT to the Acala crowdloan campaign, which successfully secured the first parachain slot in the ongoing round of Polkadot parachain auctions.

Acala is a decentralised finance network and liquidity hub on Polkadot, offering a scalable Layer-1 smart contract platform that is optimised for DeFi with built-in and ready-made financial applications. With Acala’s trustless decentralised exchange, decentralised stablecoin, liquid staking solution, and EVM+ compatibility, Acala lets developers access the best of Ethereum and the full power of Parity Technology’s Substrate development framework. There are many projects in the ecosystem integrating with Acala or building on top of Acala’s products, including a financial technology company with millions of users.

The contributed DOT will be time-locked on the Polkadot blockchain for 96 weeks and will be returned to the Company following the completion of the respective Acala parachain lease. Following the successful Acala parachain auction bid, KR1 is going to receive a to-be-determined amount of Acala (“ACA”) tokens over a time period of 96 weeks in return for supporting the Acala crowdloan campaign.

This method of token distribution involves no direct investment of capital, instead, it is an indirect investment with the opportunity costs being the inaccessibility of the locked DOT funds as well as foregoing any staking yields on the contributed DOT for the time period.

In addition, following Acala’s token redenomination, the Company will receive a total of ??10,205,128.21 ACA tokens in line with KR1’s previous backing of Acala’s seed and private funding rounds.

George McDonaugh, Managing Director and Co-Founder of KR1, commented:

“Polkadot has reached a major milestone in its development with the first parachains launching in a matter of weeks. Acala has always been at the forefront of building crucial DeFi infrastructure for Polkadot and we have been hugely excited about the project since we first backed the team in their seed funding round almost two years ago. Over time, we believe an interconnected multi billion dollar decentralised finance ecosystem will emerge built on top of the rails of Acala, Polkadot and many other complementary projects.”

The Directors of KR1 plc accept responsibility for this announcement.

--ENDS--

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About KR1 plc

KR1 plc is a leading digital asset investment company supporting early-stage decentralised and open source blockchain projects. Founded in 2016 and publicly traded in London on the AQSE Growth Market (KR1:AQSE), KR1 has one of the longest and most successful track records of investment in the digital assets space by investing in decentralised platforms and protocols that are emerging to form new financial and internet infrastructures.

www.KR1.io

Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) Disclosure

This announcement contains inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of the Market Abuse Regulation EU 596/2014 as it forms part of retained EU law (as defined in the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018).