The Week in Polkadot: Moonbeam Launches $13 Million Funding Initiative

Welcome to Decrypt’s Week in Polkadot, our regular round-up of the latest developments in the Polkadot ecosystem.

Moonbeam Network, consistently one of Polkadot’s most popular parachains since it first launched in January 2022, has launched a $13 million funding initiative.

The new initiative will look to boost Moonbeam’s ecosystem in several key areas such as gaming and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, alongside supporting its sister blockchain Moonriver, hosted on Polkadot’s canary network’ Kusama.

Moonbeam allows developers to build DeFi applications that work across the Ethereum and Polkadot blockchains, providing full interoperability with both ecosystems. Moonbeam was the first parachain launched on Polkadot.  As of Q1 2024, Moonbeam has facilitated over 49 million transactions, launched more than 300 projects, and built a community of 200,000 members.

The fund has already made its first investment into gaming platform N3MUS, a start-up which works on better integrating Web3 with conventional gaming platforms. Its platform already supports 130 games, with a total player base of 1 million.

If you're interested in developing within the Moonbeam ecosystem, you can head here to apply for grant money and technical support.

Polkadot community votes to invest in DeFi

Polkadot has allocated three million DOT tokens, roughly $20 million at the current price, into two DeFi projects, following an almost unanimous community vote via its decentralized governance.

Hydration, a DeFi protocall meant to bring liquidity to the Polkadot ecosystem, will receive two million DOT tokens, or $13.4 million at current rates.

The funds will be used to improve the trading efficiency of Hydration’s single-sided liquidity provisioning platform Omnipool.

Omnipool is what is known as a liquidity pool, a ‘bank’ of cryptocurrencies which can be used to facilitate transactions on a decentralised exchange.

Meanwhile, decentralized exchange (DEX) StellaSwap will receive one million DOT tokens, roughly $6.7 million.

The capital will be used to grow and deepen the market depth of its strategic assets to drive utility across the Polkadot ecosystem.

Web3 Foundation invests in Asian Polkadot ecosystem

The Web3 Foundation, the organization behind Polkadot, has given PolkaPort East a grant as part of its Decentralized Futures program

The money will be used to enhance technical, community, and ecosystem growth within the Polkadot network within Hong Kong and the surrounding area.

Polkaport East will look to establish and grow a vibrant Polkadot community in Hong Kong, supporting current investors as well as attracting new teams and institutional investors.

By far one of Asia’s largest financial capitals, Hong Kong launched its Virtual Asset Trading Platform (VATP) handbook in June last year, to encourage legitimate crypto activity in the region.