Current Mobile Banking App Joins the DeFi Train Via Polkadot's Acala Network

Current has announced plans to integrate decentralized finance (DeFi) features into its mobile banking app, starting with Polkadot’s Acala Network. Current’s deal with Acala will make it possible for the team to build hybrid finance (HyFi) ecosystem enabling consumers to enjoy the benefits of both traditional and decentralized financial applications, according to a press release on May 18, 2021.

Current Brings DeFi to Centralized Finance 

In a bid to bridge the gap between the traditional finance world and decentralized finance (DeFi), Current, an American financial technology firm with nearly three million customers, has inked a partnership deal with Acala, an all-in-one DeFi hub powered by Polkadot (DOT), the 8th-largest blockchain project in the world.

As stated in a press release, the first of its kind partnership aims to develop what the team calls hybrid finance (HyFi), a combination of both traditional and decentralized financial applications to offer consumers a whole new world of opportunities.

Established in October 2019, Acala is a DeFi project in the Polkadot ecosystem that claims to be focused on making it easier for users to trade, issue self-serviced loans, provide liquidity, access staking services, and earn high annual percentage yields (APY) on their cryptoassets.

A Long Time Coming

So far, the Acala project has secured three Web3 Foundation grants and it’s also backed by some notable firms in the blockchain industry, including Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital, and Hypersphere, amongst others.

Commenting on the Current-Acala alliance, Bette Chen, Co-Founder of Acala, expressed excitement over the partnership, adding that the “groundbreaking innovation” will offer Current’s customers “cutting-edge financial solutions.”

Notably, Trevor Marshall, Chief Technology Officer at Current, has hinted that the firm has been making active plans to break into the DeFi space over the past six years and its breakthrough with Acala will usher in DeFi tools into the Current app before the end of 2021.

“We created Current because we could see how money was being re-networked through new technologies. Our initiative with Acala allows us to flex this muscle we have been building for the past six years. In some ways, this partnership is really just the beginning of the actual rollout we’ve been developing this whole time,” declared Marshall.

The Polkadot ecosystem has been growing steadily despite the fact that the project is yet to roll out its much-talked-about parachains.

At press time, the price of Polkadtot’s native crypto, DOT is exchanging hands for $37.49, with a market cap of $35.20 billion, as seen on CoinMarketCap.

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