Velocity Labs — Building the future of DeFi on Polkadot

Blockchain technology has brought an immense amount of innovation across many verticals: culture, finance, coordination, social media and infrastructure, to name a few. Financial services and democratized access to its instruments is, arguably, the most compelling and scalable use-case of the aforementioned. Access to financial services brings incredible benefits to people from all backgrounds.

In 2022, the World Bank reported that there were approximately 1.5 billion unbanked people in the world. Many of these unbanked people resort to crypto already, some entering through P2E gaming, or using different DeFi instruments on Ethereum and similar EVM-compatible chains. Despite the popularity of these ecosystems, it has become increasingly evident that the only way to scale these systems to billions of users is by implementing a robust, modular, and multi-chain architecture. Since its genesis, Polkadot has succeeded in building a significantly more robust infrastructure capable of offering decentralized compute at scale while enabling trustless interoperability between applications. Velocity Labs sees the potential and opportunity in transforming Polkadot into a hub for resilient DeFi applications.

However obvious this might seem, the ecosystem as it currently stands, lacks the necessary tooling and infrastructure for DeFi to thrive and leverage the quality, availability and flexibility of Polkadot’s blockspace. The ecosystem needs facilitators that understand DeFi and the underlying technology, and are able to build and empower new teams to create financial applications that are only possible on Polkadot.

Velocity Labs’ bid is to be that facilitator. We’re a team of DeFi and Polkadot veterans whose goal is to offer a full suite of services tailored to every project wanting to build financial services, from advisory, to incubation and funding. Currently, our offerings cover:

• Tooling & Infrastructure Development

• Infrastructure Business Development for Polkadot

• DeFi Incubation (Engineering, Product and GTM Support)

• Advisory

As we grow, our ambitious plan will continue to evolve, always pointing towards a more accessible and interoperable ecosystem for both user and developers to enable the next generation of DeFi products to be built on Polkadot. Our endgame is simple: if we get this right, Polkadot will be unleashed.

As a first step, we’ll be operating the DeFi Infra & Tooling Bounty program with some of the most recognized builders as curators. This will open up more than $4M USD in funding from the Treasury to support developers and infrastructure providers coming into Polkadot

If you would like to apply, or you think we can help you explore Polkadot and its infinite possibilities, get in touch with our team.