Week in Polkadot: Moonbeam Launches $13 Million Funding Initiative

In summary

Moonbeam launched a $13 million funding initiative to boost the ecosystem, focusing on gaming and tokenization of real-world assets.
Polkadot allocated three million DOT tokens, approximately $20 million, to DeFi projects such as Hydration and StellaSwap, following a community vote.
The Web3 Foundation invested in PolkaPort East to strengthen the growth of Polkadot in Hong Kong, supporting its Virtual Asset Trading Platform manual.

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Welcome to Polkadot Week Decryptour regular roundup of the latest developments in the ecosystem of Polkadot.

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

The new initiative will seek to boost the Moonbeam ecosystem in several key areas such as gaming and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, as well as supporting its sister blockchain Moonriver, hosted on the Polkadot Kusama Canary Network.

Moonbeam allows developers to build DeFi applications that run on the Ethereum and Polkadot blockchains, providing complete interoperability with both ecosystems. Moonbeam was the first hot wallet launched on Polkadot. As of the first quarter of 2024, Moonbeam has facilitated more than 49 million transactions, launched more than 300 projects, and built a community of 200,000 members.

The fund has already made its first investment in gaming platform N3MUS, a startup working on better integrating Web3 with mainstream gaming platforms. Its platform already supports 130 games, with a total player base of 1 million.

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

Polkadot Community Votes to Invest in DeFi

Polkadot has allocated three million DOT tokens, approximately $20 million at the current price, into two DeFi projects, following a near-unanimous community vote through its decentralized governance.

Hydration, a DeFi protocol aimed at bringing 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 provision platform, Omnipool.

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

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

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

Web3 Foundation invests in the Asian Polkadot ecosystem

The Web3 Foundation, the organization behind Polkadot, has awarded 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 in and around Hong Kong.

Polkaport East will seek to establish and grow a vibrant Polkadot community in Hong Kong, supporting existing investors and attracting new teams and institutional investors.

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