Blockchain · 2021 – 2023
Launching a Parachain
Head of Product, Pendulum
TL;DR
Pendulum was a Substrate-built Polkadot parachain optimised for cross-border payments. Its crowdloan reached its 300,000 DOT hard cap in three minutes — the fastest parachain auction in Polkadot's history — and the chain launched on Polkadot Mainnet in February 2023.
Pendulum was a parachain built on Substrate, Polkadot’s out-of-the-box blockchain framework.
Product development involved extensive research on feasibility and network selection, along with coordinating the many complexities of a parachain auction — spanning community engagement, technical development, marketing, and operations in a highly complex, multifaceted environment.
We worked closely with the Stellar Development Foundation and the Web3 Foundation, securing grants from both to develop technical specifications. One standout product was Spacewalk, the first bridge between the Stellar and Polkadot networks.
Key challenges included navigating tokenomics, WebAssembly, and rapidly evolving protocol standards, alongside stakeholder and community management, and building interfaces for the network.
Concept: a blockchain network optimised for cross-border payments
Cross-border payments are expensive and slow, and one of the biggest obstacles is currency conversion. Traditional foreign exchange relies on layers of intermediaries, each adding cost and delay.
At the time, automated market makers (AMMs) were emerging as a new way to exchange assets on-chain, and we saw an opportunity to use them to offer better market rates for fiat-pegged currencies. The vision: a smart contract platform purpose-built for foreign exchange, where stablecoins representing local currencies could be swapped efficiently, around the clock.
Stellar was the natural starting point — a network optimised for speed and interoperability with existing financial infrastructure, with a rich ecosystem of regulated, fiat-backed stablecoins. But Stellar had no smart contract system, so the logic had to live elsewhere. We chose to build on Polkadot’s innovative parachain architecture: a network of specialised blockchains sharing the security of a common relay chain, built with the Substrate framework. This gave us shared security, forkless upgrades, and native cross-chain messaging — with a trust-minimised bridge connecting the new chain back to Stellar’s fiat rails.
Result: the fastest parachain auction in Polkadot’s history
Pendulum’s crowdloan reached its 300,000 DOT hard cap (~$1.4M) in just three minutes — a record for the fastest-ever parachain auction across Polkadot and Kusama. The chain launched on Polkadot Mainnet in February 2023.
Alongside the auction win, the project delivered Spacewalk, the first bridge between the Stellar and Polkadot ecosystems. Built on the XCLAIM protocol as a set of Substrate pallets, Spacewalk enables trust-minimised transfers of Stellar’s fiat-backed stablecoins into Polkadot — the foundation for fiat-optimised DeFi on the network.
The work was carried out in close collaboration with the Stellar Development Foundation and the Web3 Foundation, with grants from both supporting the development of the technical specifications.