The Algorand Foundation has just announced a new DeFi innovation program, titled Viridis, with a fund of 150 million ALGO tokens (worth approximately $300M) to attract and boost development in the sector. Much of the money will be spent on projects which aid in the Algorand platform centred development of money markets, including options, synthetic asset applications, NFT projects and decentralized exchanges (DEX’s).
Viridis means ‘green’ in Latin, and this is likely to be a nod to the Algorand Foundations pledge to be the ‘greenest blockchain with a carbon-negative network’. The Foundation partnered with ClimateTrade, a leader in CO2 emissions transparency and traceability, which is using blockchain solutions to improve sustainability efforts
Viridis is the Latin source of several English words, with Viridescent being used since the 1800s by botanists who used Latin words to name plants.
Viridis DeFi fund: 150M ALGO tokens
50 Million ALGO tokens have been allocated to exclusively support the development of DeFi infrastructure and applications, with around $5M worth being allotted to “SupaGrants”, which are earmarked for the creation of bridges onto Ethereum and other blockchains, as well as oracle price feed integrations.
The remaining 100 Million ALGO tokens will be used to provide liquidity and support for DeFi innovation projects on the network.
“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.”
Sean Lee, CEO of Algorand Foundation
Upon the announcement, the native ALGO token shot up around 10%, marking a 100% gain in the last two days alone, and it has a current market cap of around 10.7 Billion USD. The price rally over the last week could be in part due to the official approval of the blockchain by the El Salvadoran government to build the country’s blockchain infrastructure, as the Latin American nation became the first in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender.
