coincodex.com
Key highlights:
- The Algorand Foundation has announced a new 150 million ALGO fund ($300 million) called Viridis
- The fund's goal is to help grow the DeFi ecosystem on the Algorand blockchain
- 100 million ALGO will be going towards liquidity incentives, while 50 million ALGO is reserved for grants
Algorand is betting big on DeFi
Large incentive programs seem to be the go-to solution for layer 1 blockchain platforms that are trying to reach a bigger audience of both users and developers. Blockchain platforms like Avalanche, Celo and Fantom have all recently announced incentive programs worth $100 million or above, and the latest project to hop on the bandwagon is Algorand.
Earlier today, the Algorand Foundation announced Viridis, a 150 million ALGO fund (about $300 million at the time of writing) to support the growth of decentralized finance on the Algorand blockchain. From this fund, 50 million ALGO will be used to for “SupaGrants”, which will fund the development of key DeFi infrastructure. The first two “SupaGrants” are both worth $5 million and will fund projects building decentralized price oracles and cross-chain token bridges for Algorand.
The remaining 100 million ALGO from the Viridis fund will be allocated towards liquidity incentives for DeFi apps built on Algorand. Presumably, this means that users providing liquidity on selected Algorand DeFi apps will be able to earn rewards in the form of ALGO, but the Algorand Foundation hasn’t yet provided details about what the liquidity incentives will look like. However, the Foundation did mention Tinyman, an automated market maker built on Algorand, as one of the projects they’ve been communicating with.
Here’s what Algorand Foundation CEO Sean Lee had to say about the Viridis fund:
“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”
Algorand’s native asset ALGO has been showing a very strong performance in the markets recently. ALGO gained 63.6% this week, despite a disappointing performance from the cryptocurrency market as a whole.
Besides the announcement of the Viridis fund, Algorand is currently also benefiting from a bullish market for layer 1 blockchains. The native assets of other layer 1 platforms like Fantom, Mina Protocol, Near, Harmony and Solana have also recorded significant gains this week.
Another piece of positive news for ALGO came at the very end of August, when the Algorand project announced that blockchain firm Koibanx signed an agreement with the government of El Salvador to create blockchain infrastructure based on Algorand technology.