Matic Pledges $5M in Tokens to Entice DeFi Projects Into Building on Its Network

Ethereum's scalable sidechain Matic Network has set aside $5 million for a new incubator fund aimed at attracting decentralized finance (DeFi) projects to build straight on its protocol.

• Matic said Monday the grants would incentivize promising DeFi projects to build on its protocol, rather than directly onto Ethereum.
• Grants will be paid in matic, a native staking token currently trading at $0.02, according to CoinGecko.
• Matic has already given out more than $1 million in grants, although it hasn't revealed any of the beneficiaries.
• Matic Network is an Ethereum sidechain that can handle up to 65,000 transactions per second; it raised $5 million in an initial exchange offering in 2019.
• In a statement, Matic said building a DeFi space on its protocol would give projects scalability with ready access to the Ethereum mainnet.
• In a speech in June, Matic COO Sandeep Nailwal said the company had already had some DeFi projects move to its protocol.
• Crypto derivatives platform FTX said last week it was building a decentralized exchange (DEX) on Solana, another scalable network that would be interoperable with Ethereum.
• As with Matic, FTX said building a DEX on Solana gave it sufficient throughput while remaining plugged into the Ethereum DeFi space, worth over $4.2 billion at press time.

See also: Five Years In, DeFi Now Defines Ethereum