Algorand Foundation Launches $300 Million USD Fund to Support DeFi Innovation

Algorand Foundation's Viridis DeFi Program will fuel the growth of decentralized exchanges, money markets, and more

SINGAPORE, Sept. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The 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 best blockchain network for the future of finance.

"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.

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. 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.

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 incentivising liquidity providers for fueling DeFi on Algorand. A number of projects, such as the first automated market maker DEX, such 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. And they will be doing so on the most sustainable, carbon negative, high performance blockchain in crypto today.

To learn more about the Viridis DeFi Program and the first "SupaGrants", please visit: https://algorand.foundation/news/viridis

What does Viridis mean? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/viridis

ABOUT THE ALGORAND FOUNDATION

The Algorand Foundation is dedicated to fulfilling the global promise of blockchain technology by leveraging the Algorand protocol and open source software, which was initially designed by Silvio Micali and a team of leading scientists. With core beliefs in the establishment of an open, public and permissionless blockchain, the Algorand Foundation has a vision for an inclusive ecosystem that provides an opportunity for everyone to harness the potential of an equitable and truly borderless economy.

Algorand, Inc.
algorand@dittopr.com

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