Applications now open! DeFi and Infrastructure Polkadot Bounty

In our announcement blogspot we outlined the importance of a resilient and unstoppable decentralized financial system, and how Polkadot is the perfect blockspace ecosystem for it.

On May 26, 2020, the first Relay Chain genesis block of Polkadot was born The network later upgraded to NPoS (Nominated Proof of Stake) less than a month after launch, and in December 2021, Parachains began to roll out, finalizing the Polkadot v1 launch stage. Moonbeam, Interlay, Hydra and Centrifuge led the charge and Polkadot’s DeFi ecosystem was kickstarted.

At that point in time, Polkadot was the first network to be showing a credible path to solving the blockchain trilemma between security, decentralization and scalability. Teams like Acala and Moonbeam had managed to attract all the builder and VC attention with the expectation that DeFi would have its home on Polkadot.

Despite such a promising start, after the 2022 collapses of Blockfi, FTX and multi-chain hacks, things took a turn for the worse on the crypto ecosystem at large. Within Polkadot in particular, the Nomad bridge hack and the aUSD de-peg events were huge setbacks for the ecosystem as a whole.

At the end of 2023, Web3 Foundation announced the launch of Decentralized Futures: a program that would distribute funds across the Polkadot ecosystem towards its development in a wide array of verticals. Simultaneously, Velocity Labs was being born, out of the need of our founders to get Polkadot back in shape to host truly unstoppable DeFi.

After months of dialogue with Web3 Foundation, Parachain developers, exchanges, cross-chain builders, and other relevant stakeholders, we realized that the biggest gaps in our ecosystem were the lack of token infrastructure and tooling. The first being fundamental to having a healthy on-chain token economy, and the second one being a key pillar for builders to take full advantage of Polkadot and its tech stack. With these goals in mind, Velocity Labs decided to make a proposal: the DeFi Infrastructure & Tooling Bountya DeFi and Infrastructure bounty.

Today, we’re delighted to announce that the bounty has been approved. Thanks to the help of a set of experienced parachain builders and community members that will act as bounty curators, we’ll be streamlining grant disbursement for teams wanting to problem-solve with us.

We’re looking to offer grants to teams focusing on:

• Token Infrastructure

• Chain Abstraction

• Composability

• Seamless onboarding to Polkadot

• Tooling Maintenance

• Documentation

  
  

A decentralized network is nothing without its community. We’re here to prove that Polkadot’s design is not only revolutionary, but extremely effective and the perfect host for DeFi. We’ll only be able to achieve this, if we work together.

If this piqued your interest, here’s more information on the bounty.