The Algorand Foundation (ALGO) is launching the “Viridis DeFi” fund with approximately $300 million to support its ecosystem. Two thirds of the endowment will be allocated to a liquidity mining program.
300 million for the Algorand ecosystem
The Algorand Foundation (ALGO) has announced the launch of the “Viridis DeFi” program to boost its ecosystem. The fund is endowed with ALGO 150 million, or about $320 million at current prices. The goal is to support the development of decentralized applications (dApps) and encourage liquidity providers to come to the Algorand network.
About one third of the funds will be allocated to the AlgoGrant program. The objective is to develop dApps dedicated to decentralized finance (DeFi) such as decentralized exchanges (DEX) and automated market makers (AMM).
As part of this, the first $5 million “SupaGrant” will take the form of a call for projects to build a two-way bridge between Ethereum (ETH) and other blockchains. Sean Lee, CEO of the Algorand Foundation, said in a statement:
“The Algorand Foundation is excited to launch this funding program to help accelerate the adoption of DeFi.”
A major liquidity program
Since liquidity is a fundamental driver of DeFi adoption, the Algorand Foundation has decided to allocate 100 million ALGO or about $200 million for this purpose. Thus, users will be incentivized to provide liquidity within the Algorand ecosystem.
In effect, the Foundation is ensuring that quality DeFi projects will be able to easily access liquidity by incentivizing users to provide capital. A number of projects are already eligible such as the decentralized exchange Tinyman.
Following the fund’s announcement, ALGO’s share price climbed to $2.20. The token is up 80% in the last 7 days. At the time of writing, ALGO is trading around $2.15.