Algorand Foundation Launches $300 Million Fund to Support DeFi Innovation

Algorand Foundation, an organization dedicated to fulfilling the global promise of blockchain technology by leveraging the Algorand protocol and open-source software, today announced the Viridis DeFi Program, a 150 million Algo (worth approximately $300 million USD today) fund to support DeFi innovation on the Algorand network.

The fund will fuel the growth of decentralized exchanges, money markets, options markets, synthetic asset applications, and NFT platforms, all running on the high-speed Algorand blockchain.

“The Algorand Foundation is excited to launch this funding program to help accelerate the adoption of DeFi across the Algorand Ecosystem. Creating the right infrastructure, application ecosystem and liquidity will be key to ensuring that DeFi on Algorand is regarded as the world’s most energy-efficient, scalable, and low-cost DeFi ecosystem,” said Sean Lee, CEO of the Algorand Foundation in a statement.

Developing on Algorand

Founded in 2017, 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.

Its underlying blockchain enables the frictionless exchange of value and the simple creation of next-generation financial products and protocols.

50 million 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 infrastructures such as cross-chain bridges and price oracles.

The first $5 million 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 $5 million 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.

Since liquidity is a fundamental driver of DeFi and DApp adoption, the Algorand Foundation is assigning a fund of 100 million ALGO (worth approximately $200m USD today) to support and provide liquidity incentives to the Algorand DeFi ecosystem.

In doing so, the Algorand Foundation is ensuring that quality DeFi projects will be able to access liquidity easily while also incentivizing liquidity providers for fueling DeFi on Algorand. A number of projects, such as the first automated market maker DEX Tinyman, have already engaged with the Foundation to ensure that they will have the appropriate liquidity support required at launch.

By supporting DeFi infrastructure, DApps, and liquidity with this dedicated fund, innovators and developers will be able to make an immediate impact on Algorand’s DeFi ecosystem. And they will be doing so on the most sustainable, carbon-negative, high-performance blockchain in crypto today.