Hedera’s HBAR Foundation announces a $155m fund focused on DeFi

Hedera Hashgraph recently made headlines with the announcement that it added Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility. Now, while the crypto world is still under the influence of that particular news, the HBAR Foundation made a new announcement that took the industry by surprise even more, stating that it is launching a new DeFi incentive program.

What is Hedera’s new DeFi incentive program?

According to the project’s recent announcement, Hedera Hashgraph is preparing a $155 million fund that will focus on decentralized finance. The fund, known as Crypto Economy Fund, will put aside $60 million to be allocated as liquidity mining rewards for DEXes, while the rest will be used for infrastructure-focused grants.

Those who have followed the development and growth of the DeFi sector likely realize that the DeFi sector has been blowing up for almost two years now, which makes Hedera quite late to the race. However, the project seems to be serious about joining the DeFi world and the fund has grown to become one of the best ways to attract developers and projects. Once the ecosystem starts seeing more DeFi protocols, users themselves will also start coming in and helping the entire ecosystem grow further.

So far, an official website reported that the Hedera chain holds only around $50 million in TVL, although this is likely to change in the near future. The fund is seen by many as a signal that the project’s developers are ready to try out a new strategy and shift the way they conduct their business.

Hedera’s motivation and plans for the future

The Foundation’s Director, Elaine Song, stated that Hedera has always had a strong focus on enterprise, and even within enterprise focused on a discrete use case, such as efficient distributed ledgers and throughput. However, there is another part of the industry that is focused on adoption and retail.

Furthermore, Song referenced ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) efforts that the project has made, as well as the retail-focused staking effort led by the first team to receive the grant from the new program — Stader Labs. She added that all of this is definitely broadening the project’s scope, as it is taking everything that it learned over the past years, and reshaping it to create something that would be beneficial to the users.

Hedera now plans to spend the next quarter or two fleshing out the infrastructure for its new and improved ecosystem, with plans to include a lending platform, DAO tools, oracle services, and potentially more.

HBAR price performance

After reaching its all-time high on September 15th, 2021, HBAR price corrected from the new record at $0.50 to $0.30 by the end of the month. After that, it started to slowly grow again until it hit $0.45 in mid-November last year, but as the bearish market started, the project lost all strength and crashed down.

The drop eventually led it to the bottom at $0.20 in late January 2022, and since then, the project has been stuck between this support and a resistance at $0.26. In late February, the price dropped below $0.24, and it did not move back up for over a month. However, things started to change around March 16th.

Hedera price started going up again, once again reaching the resistance at $0.26 only yesterday, March 29th. For the time being, the resistance is still holding, although that might change in the near future, provided that the new recovery led by Bitcoin doesn’t lose its strength, and that the bear market doesn’t take over control once again.

To learn more visit our Investing in Hedera Hashgraph guide.