It should come as no surprise that Aave has been turning a lot of heads in recent months since their mainnet launch.
With a nearly $40M market cap since it’s launch in January, The sector rising lending project comes jam-packed with a suite of features including DeFi lending, stable borrowing and Flash Loans just to name a few.
.@AaveAave flirting with its all-time high total value locked of $30.87M https://t.co/6pjcTmpVnN pic.twitter.com/BflNLb2Udb
— DeFi Pulse ?? (@defipulse) April 2, 2020
Today, Aave expands on its impressive stack with new features and the start of it’s first round of ecosystem grants.
??We've officially launched Round 1 of Aave Ecosystem Grants to support talented devs, entrepreneurs, and teams in #BUIDLing your amazing projects ¦?
Read our latest blog post by @daveytea for details on the grant application requirements and process:https://t.co/T9JiywHuZ7
— Aave (@AaveAave) April 2, 2020
What’s New?
Aave recently integrated support for more web3 wallets – namely WalletConnect and Ledger. In tandem with a new homepage which shows total lending pool sizes and the relative lending and borrowing rates, Aave is continually improving the usability of the growing lending protocol.
Lastly, Aave integrated reserve overviews to let users better understand the evolving nature of any given asset on the protocol. This intuitive dashboard includes crucial information such as over-collateralization ratios, liquidation penalties, utilization ratios and more. All this goes to say that it’s never been easier to make a more informed decision about lending or borrowing on Aave.
Ecosystem Grants
Throughout the wider crypto ecosystem, many projects have used their war chests to incubate innovation within their respective network. Yesterday, Aave announced the rollout of an aDai-based grant program for those looking to build on the protocol’s stack. Here’s what you should know.
- Grants will be between 500-5000 aDai in size
- Grants will be allocated relative to strength of the proposal as per the following guidelines.
- Grants will be awarded on a rolling basis and may be subject to milestones.
What’s unique about this grant program is the size of the grants is theoretically less important than the signal itself. We expect that those who receive grants from Aave with be able to leverage a close relationship with Aave’s extensive team of developers and industry professionals. In fact, we actually believe these “microgrants” can go a longer way than say dishing a project $100k and sending them on their way.
If you or your project think you’d be a good fit for the grant program, please email [email protected] with the following details:
- Names and links of your team members (e.g. twitter/linkedIn/etc).
- Role or specialty of each member (e.g. full stack dev, solidity dev).
- What you’re building (1-3 sentences)
- Aave Ecosystem value add (1–3 sentences).
- Project gameplan and roadmap to sustainability (1–3 sentences).
- Grant size (lower grant requests are more likely to be accepted)
- Any links to your MVP, source code, or previous projects.
What to Expect
In the coming year, we expect Aave to keep making noise in the wider DeFi landscape. It’s clear the project has a strong grasp on community development and is going above and beyond to ensure their community has the tools (and now funding opportunities) possible to create the next generation of financial primitives.
Perhaps the best example of this is their recent integration with Swap Rate, making them the second protocol integrated after Compound.
Introducing Swap Rate by @Opium_Network – a #DeFi product allowing you to swap variable rates for fixed rates and vice versa with up to 10x leverage ??
And they just integrated @AaveAave fixed rates too ??https://t.co/1t7idEjZiP
— DeFi Rate (@DefiRate) April 1, 2020
We’ll be keeping a close eye on any projects which come out of this grant program and looking forward to sharing them with you!
In the meantime, be sure to stay up on all things Aave via their official Twitter.
Cooper is focused on building compelling blockchain products. He currently works as the managing director at Fitzner Blockchain Consulting and is a contributor to DAOs like MetaCartel and Moloch. He is an active member of the Ethereum community and has a strong interest in for-profit businesses such as The Block Crypto and Messari.
