Algorand Foundation Launches $300M USD Fund to Back DeFi Innovation | FinSMEs

Posted on September 18, 2021 by Design in Design Innovation | 0 Comments

The Algorand Foundation, a Singapore-based organization dedicated to advancing the Algorand protocol and open source software, launched the Viridis DeFi Program, a 150m Algo (worth approximately $300m USD) fund.

The fund will back DeFi innovation on the Algorand network, accelerating the growth of decentralized exchanges, money markets, options markets, synthetic asset applications, and NFT platforms, all running on the Algorand blockchain network.

Founded in 2017 and led by Sean Lee, CEO, Algorand was built from the ground up to handle the volume of transactions needed for DeFi, financial institutions, and governments to smoothly transition to the future of finance, or FutureFi. The blockchain technology of choice for nearly 1,000 global organizations, Algorand enables frictionless exchange of value and the simple creation of next-generation financial products and protocols.

50million ALGO, which has been re-allocated from the AlgoGrant fund, will exclusively support the development of DeFi infrastructure and applications ( DApps ). Within this, DeFi “SupaGrants” have been designed to support the creation of critical DeFi infrastructure such as cross-chain bridges and price oracles. The first $5M SupaGrant will be a call for proposals to build bi-directional bridges from Ethereum and other chains. Once ported to Algorand, DApps need access to market data to manage a variety of smart contract functions. The second $5M SupaGrant will seek proposals for the integration of oracle networks with associated price feeds. The balance of this fund will support further application development across this burgeoning DeFi ecosystem.

The foundation is assigning a fund of 100m ALGO (worth approximately $200m USD) to support and provide liquidity incentives to the Algorand DeFi ecosystem. A number of projects, such as the first automated market maker DEX https://tinyman.org, have already engaged with the Foundation to ensure that they will have the appropriate liquidity support required at launch.

By supporting DeFi instructure, DApps and Liquidity with this dedicated fund, innovators and developers will be able to make an immediate impact on Algorand’s DeFi ecosystem.