The recent crypto market crash has sent shockwaves around the crypto community and spurred a wave of interest in decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, highlighting the need for faster innovations away from centralized systems.

The mayhem may even prove pivotal for the crypto industry but not as imagined by many in traditional finance and the mainstream media who look at crypto as a monolithic industry. To be sure, The Defiant reported that the onset of the debacle saw a surge in users of DeFi protocols while global financial institutions have continued to execute research & development projects with blockchain-related technology.

About the Developer Funds

At Orderly Network, our vision to democratize finance and create a fairer world is more important than ever. We see an opportunity to work with highly-exceptional talents and innovative projects in the DeFi space. In response to these needs and opportunities, we are joining Proximity, Spin, and Tonic in launching a $10M fund that is dedicated to decentralized orderbook solutions on NEAR.

“The recent market downturn has displaced a great number of talents and stalled many promising DEX projects. The funding comes at perfect timing — aside from extending help to those who are affected, it has a stronger purpose of funding and supporting the innovations that would further strengthen decentralized orderbook solutions on NEAR. Participating teams are also able to leverage the knowledge and experience from our incubators, WOO Network, and NEAR that were built by professional traders,” Terence Ng, co-founder and CTO at Orderly Network.

The funds from the participants’ treasuries would be deployed in the form of grants or investments for DeFi protocols that leverage the central limit orderbook (CLOB) infrastructure provided by Orderly Network, Spin, or Tonic. Examples of potential products can range from DEXs, perpetual swaps, options, futures, synths, yield, money markets, and delta-neutral strategies (DNS). Proximity would also provide advisory services and developer support from our team of industry experts and core NEAR contributors.

“The recent events have confirmed that the modern crypto audience needs decentralized and transparent tools that offer users CEX-competitive trading and investing experience. A few years ago the speed and throughput of blockchains did not allow decentralized exchanges to reach the level of centralized exchanges, today the situation has changed. Sharding technology is perfectly matching the needs of modern DeFi order book developers and opens a wide range of opportunities to build and scale. The new program of supporting order book DEXes is perfectly timed and could give talented teams the initial impulse they need,” — Alex Pavlov, Founder, and CEO at Spin.

“We’re at a turning point for DeFi adoption. In light of recent events, the need for transparency and open-source financial primitives has never been more clear. NEAR’s architecture makes it uniquely positioned to support decentralized applications with robust features that were previously only possible on centralized platforms. We’re committed to providing the most developer-friendly open-source DeFi platform on NEAR. Tonic is excited to work with Proximity Labs to onboard new developers to the NEAR DeFi ecosystem through this new initiative.” — Marko B, co-founder of Tonic.

“At Proximity, we believe in the necessity of a robust and highly performant orderbook DEX economy for a decentralized future and that NEAR is the right place to realize such a vision. Written using Rust and WASM, NEAR has the highest throughput and lowest latency in DeFi, with a fast finality of 1–2 seconds and near-zero transaction costs. Furthermore, with scalability achieved through sharding, the Web 2-friendly account model, and a focus on onboarding with the JavaScript SDK or native meta-transactions, NEAR is well-equipped for the mass adoption of DeFi,” Proximity said in their official release.

This $10M fund is an open invite for builders from any ecosystem to advance NEAR’s decentralized orderbook infrastructure to a level that will rival centralized exchanges. If interested, please fill in this form.

We are always looking to collaborate as we believe strongly that a collaborative approach is needed to ensure the success of the thriving DeFi ecosystem we all envision. Do not hesitate to reach out and see how we can work together to create fairer finance via the power of blockchain.