Polygon Launches $100M Fund to Support DeFi Adoption

Polygon, the Ethereum scaling project formerly known as Matic, has launched a $100 million fund aimed at making decentralized finance (DeFi) more accessible to end users.

The so-called #DeFiforAll Fund will focus on efficiently onboarding users to decentralized products and platforms, according to an announcement Wednesday.

While other ecosystems have ramped up developer funds in recent months, the $100 million pot of money is one of the larger commitments in recent memory. (The fund will tap up to 2% of the MATIC token's 10 billion total supply, or 200 million MATIC, co-founder Sandeep Nailwal explained via Telegram. At press time, MATIC was trading at $0.80, making the fund worth $160 million in dollar terms.)

The funding, in MATIC tokens, will come from the network’s ecosystem fund and be deployed over the next two to three years.

“We want to support the top DeFi protocols on Ethereum and help them scale and grow with Polygon,” Nailwal said in a statement. Aave and Curve have both recently built Polygon-compatible versions of their trading platforms.

With mounting gas fees on Ethereum, Polygon's #DeFiforAll Fund hopes to attract more casual users who have been priced out of participating in DeFi so far.

“Polygon is committed to making DeFi accessible to the next million users,” Nailwal said.

MATIC is the top performer Wednesday among the larger coins and is up 41-fold for the year to date.

UPDATE (April 29, 3:27 UTC): Adds information on the token composition of the fund.