Decentralized finance, or DeFi for short, has grown significantly over the past two years. The Algorand Foundation has uncovered a new fund positioned to raise funds for specific DeFi projects that build on their native blockchain.

The funding is called Viridis DeFi Fund, which is run by the Algorand Foundation – a group responsible for the Algorand blockchain and the development of its ecosystem. “This fund will provide 150 million Algo to accelerate the substantial initial development of the DeFi ecosystem on Algorand,” stated a Friday announcement posted on the Algorand Foundation website.

“The fund will drive the development of decentralized exchanges, money markets, options markets, synthetic asset applications, and NFT platforms, all of which run on the best blockchain network in the financial industry of the future,” Algorand said in a public statement on Friday.
At the time of publication, Algorand’s native coin (ALGO) was trading at $ 1.96 based on CoinMarketCap data. The fund is now worth $ 294 million, including $ 150 million in ALGO.

As the Ethereum blockchain struggled to scale and meet DeFi demand, other blockchains have become increasingly important, as evidenced by the network’s high fees.

At the start of the fund, the Algorand Foundation presented the first two building categories from Algorand DeFi that can receive funds from the fund. Call them “SupaGrants,” $ 5 million each in grants. “We are pleased to make the first two SupaGrants available, which support the creation of a business-critical DeFi infrastructure,” says the article. “Introduced $ 5 million Oracle SupaGrant and $ 5 million SupaGrant Bridge.”

Oracles in the crypto space are essentially ways of relaying information from sources outside these networks to specific blockchains. Bridges help connect closed blockchains to interact with each other, thereby limiting the potential for individual networks. The oracle scholarship is open to interested applicants; the bridge financing is still being worked on.