Hedera (HBAR) Launches $155M Fund To Drive DeFi Innovation

By Kevin • March 29, 2022 9:27 pm • Comments

The HBAR Foundation has recently announced that it will be launching a new $155 Crypto Economy Fund which will be used to drive Hedera’s growth in the DeFi world.

Hedera is one of the newer players in the decentralized finance space and currently has a total locked value of $50 million on the blockchain.

This TLV is not yet as high as some other competitors, but the company is looking to use this new fund as well as its new EVM compatibility to help accelerate the growth of the Hedera ecosystem.

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The fund will also be used for other additional purposes such as being used for liquidity mining rewards for DEXs and special grants for projects that create value for HBAR.

CoinDesk reports:

With a gaudy incentive program and the recent addition of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility, the HBAR Foundation is hoping to follow the same playbook used by other layer 1s such as Near and Fantom to climb the TVL rankings.

In an interview with CoinDesk, HBAR Foundation Director Elaine Song said that $60 million of the fund is allocated specifically as liquidity mining rewards for decentralized exchanges, while the remaining funds will be used for infrastructure-focused grants.

In some ways, the fund signals a strategy shift for the developers of the chain.

“Hedera has always been focused on enterprise, and even within enterprise focused on a discrete use case, which is efficient distributed ledgers and throughput,” said Song.

“There is another exciting part of the industry focused on retail and adoption, however.”

Investors have noticed that HBAR has been tackling a wide range of sectors recently as the foundation had previously announced that it had made big moves within the ESG (environmental social governance) space with another large fund.

The company states that it is not pivoting from one sector to another, but is actually ambitious to broaden the scope of what Hedera can do by tackling a wide variety of high growth opportunities.

The company states that the continued development of projects on Hedera ecosystem will be crucial going forward which is why it is providing large amounts of capital to incentive developers and project creators.

Among the things that are already in progress include things like oracle services, DAO tooling, and a lending platform.

Blockworks.co reports:

Non-custodial liquid staking platform Stader Labs has been awarded an undisclosed sum, among other developers.

Liquid staking enables staked assets to be used as collateral for lending, yield farming and other DeFi (decentralized finance) opportunities while allowing users to continue accruing rewards.

Stader will attempt to create a more “secure” decentralized staking infrastructure that “evolves” the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, the foundation said.

“Our goal is to bring the DeFi ecosystem to Hedera so that users can benefit from the scale and low-cost,” said HBAR Foundation CEO Shayne Higdon.

“This level of cost, performance and scale is critical as more institutions and consumers come to Hedera for issuing tokens, swapping assets, and engaging in the crypto economy.”

At the time of publishing, HBAR has been recorded to have a steady uptrend since the middle of March and has reported an increase of around 25% in the past two weeks.

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