Algorand Foundation Announces $300M Fund to Grow DeFi Innovation

The Algorand Foundation, which leverages a stable, universal platform to further blockchain adoption, on Friday (Sept. 10) announced the creation of the Viridis DeFi Program, a 150 million Algo fund that will support DeFi innovation on its network. Altogether, the fund is worth approximately $300 million USD.

Founded in 2017, Algorand was created by Silvio Micali and a team of scientists to process the volume of transactions needed for DeFi, financial institutions (FIs) and governments. Built on the tenets of an open, public and permissionless blockchain, Algorand provides a frictionless exchange of value along with next-generation financial products and protocols.

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"The Algorand Foundation is excited to launch this funding program to help accelerate the adoption of DeFi across the Algorand Ecosystem,” said Sean Lee, CEO of the Algorand Foundation, in the news release. “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.”

Of the 150 million Algo, one-third has been reallocated from the AlgoGrant fund, which has been earmarked in support of developing DeFi infrastructure and applications. This will cover DeFi "SupaGrants," which are intended to support infrastructures like cross-chain bridges and price oracles. The first two $5 million SupaGrants will be "a call for proposals to build bi-directional bridges from Ethereum and other chains" (Bridge SupaGrant), as well as the "integration of oracle networks with associated price feeds" (Price Oracle SupaGrant), per the release. The balance of this fund will support further application development.

The Algorand Foundation is assigning the other 100 million Algo to support and provide liquidity incentives to the Algorand DeFi ecosystem. A number of projects, such as Tinyman, a re-imagined decentralized trading protocol, have already engaged with the Foundation to ensure that they will have the required liquidity support at launch, the release stated.