Date: January 2023

DeFi.org is a community of thought leaders in the field of decentralized finance (DeFi). The community is led by the Orbs Network together with a consortium of market leaders in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry to collaborate and advance the cause of DeFi innovation.

Together we educate - by teaching developers and users about practical decentralization, invest - by funding the projects we believe in so they can see the light of day, accelerate - by setting projects up for success and incubating when necessary, and build - by taking an active role in contributing to the ecosystem with our own hands.

This report summarizes the major milestones achieved by DeFi.org to date.

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January 2021: DeFi.org Accelerator launched with Binance and Orbs

The first project of the DeFi Alliance is an incubator/accelerator that brings together projects, alliance members, and mentors to advance innovative DeFi ideas. Projects that join the incubator get benefits like mentorship, brand recognition and validation, grants for responsible practices such as security audits, and potential for liquidity injections at launch. Orbs, an Israeli company developing a public blockchain infrastructure, and Binance, the global blockchain company behind the world's largest digital asset exchange, teamed up to serve as the first core sponsors.

The two initial sponsors announced their commitment to finding projects that are built on the principles of fair distribution, community ownership, innovation, responsible approach to risk, sustainable economics and composability with the broader ecosystem.

The initial announcement can be viewed here.

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March 2021: Round 1 Accelerator Projects

Responses to the call for applications were overwhelming, with over 30 teams applying.

After a rigorous process, three great projects were chosen for the accelerator:

• Benchmark Protocol, a protocol that mitigates liquidation events and hedges risk with the MARK token; a supply elastic, stablecoin-alternative that connects traditional capital markets to DeFi.
• Peanut is a DeFi price balancer which maximizes DEX liquidity provider profits by reducing the risks of impermanent loss.
• Tozex, a platform designed to facilitate the tokenization of assets within one ecosystem for all the stakeholders aiming to align the interests of entrepreneurs, investors and traders.

All three projects are actively involved with mentorship and collaboration with the DeFi.org accelerator and its team of mentors.

More information on the winning projects can be found here.

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June 21: New Partner: Moonstake

As the DeFi.org Accelerator picked up steam, Moonstake, a top-5 global staking platform, joined Orbs and Binance as a sponsor at the DeFi.org Accelerator. Moonstake takes an active part in screening and supporting the companies participating in the accelerator and promoting research, training, events, and conferences.

The official announcement can be found here.

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August 2021: Twitter Trends Tool

In addition to incubating projects in the DeFi.org Accelerator, DeFi.org is proud to host a variety of useful community tools. The first, proudly contributed by the Orbs team, is the DeFi Twitter Trends Dashboard. This tool allows users to stay on top of what is going on in DeFi twitter and aggregates for them the most popular #hashtags, $cashtags, @accounts, and URLs. The dashboard helps remove the noise and gives its users a reliable source to keep track of the latest trends in the DeFi space.

Find out what's trending!

Read more here, or try it yourself at: https://twitter.defi.org/

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October 2021: New project incubation - Revault

After its success with the first round of Accelerator applicants, the next project accepted to join the DeFi Accelerator was Revault, a vault-maximization protocol that allows users to automatically shift between different DeFi vaults to achieve the highest APYs.

For more information, see here.

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October 2021: MyNFT.fyi

As DeFi develops, one major component of the ecosystem is NFTs, which both have their own unique uses and can play a role in some of the more interesting and cutting-edge concepts in the world of blockchain (such as decentralized gaming). One sign of the popularity of NFTs is their use as profile pictures on social media. This has created the risk of an imminent surge of imposters, impersonators, scammers and trolls who use this trend as an attack vector.

To benefit the crypto community, DeFi.org launched MyNFT, an easy-to-use tool for showcasing NFT profile pictures and providing on-chain proof of ownership.

Read more here, or try it out at https://mynft.fyi/.

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October 2021: Open DeFi Notifications

The next community tool born at DeFi.org was the Open Defi Notification protocol. This tool helps DeFi users mitigate a significant risk - that they will not know about a significant on-chain event, will not be able to react in time, and then potentially suffer a loss as a result of not being informed. With DeFi projects working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it is impossible for users to stay fully informed using manual efforts.

The Open DeFi Notifications protocol designed by the Orbs team for DeFi.org is a dependable mobile notifications service that helps traders stay on top of significant on chain events. The protocol sends push notifications to user devices when on-chain events occur, such as accumulated pending rewards, price swings, near liquidations, stop loss, contract upgrades, new governance votes, and more.

The Open DeFi Notification Protocol has been implemented fully by the Orbs network and is executed by the Orbs Guardians, making this the 1st fully decentralized implementation of a notification protocol.

The Notifications app boasts an impressive lineup of leading DeFi projects that have already been integrated into the Open DeFi Notification Protocol for the benefit of their users, including, among others: Aave, Uniswap, SushiSwap and more…

All in all, the app supports over 30 protocols across 6 networks: Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Fantom, Avalanche and Cronos!

Become involved and contribute: https://github.com/open-defi-notification-protocol

Learn more about the Open DeFi Notification Protocol here.

Download the app on Apple AppStore and Google Play.

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May 2022: Special DeFi Round with Polygon

In May 2022, DeFi.org launched a special round of its accelerator program in collaboration with Polygon, the leading platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development and Orbs, the Layer 3 blockchain infrastructure project.

This special round of the DeFi.org accelerator focused on building defi applications that utilize Polygon's L2 scaling capabilities and Orbs' L3 infrastructure with participants getting various benefits, including mentorship, funding opportunities, and market exposure.

This special accelerator round offered a unique opportunity for developers to utilize the Ethereum stack to its fullest potential and presented a unique opportunity for new and innovative defi applications.

Learn more about the special accelerator round here.

Two months later and with close to 100 project application submissions, the accelerator’s mentor team from defi.org, Orbs and Polygon announced the participating projects!

Most of the submissions demonstrated interesting ideas and concepts, and some showcased impressive DeFi ingenuity, solid tech and a strong team. However, after an intensive review, live interviews and a due diligence process, the DeFi.org mentor team chose the 4 winning projects to participate in this round.

The winning projects were: Ithil, Prophet, Curl and ReBaked.

Learn more about the participating projects here.

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June 2022: DappRaddar Dev Grant

In May 2022, DeFi.org and DappRadar launched a developers grant of up to $100k focused on teams contributing new projects to the Notification protocol.

The goal of the grant program was to collaborate with DappRadar, the leading and most popular websites for crypto devs, in order to attract developers and defi projects to the Open DeFi Notification Protocol to make it the standard notifications protocol for DeFi apps.

All in all, the grant was a great success, with many new collaborations with defi devs leading to new integrations to the Open DeFi Notification Protocol, such as Splassive, Frax Finance, StakeDAO, and more…

Learn more about the grant program here.

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October 2022: New website

After a lot of hard work and dedication, the DeFi.org team launched the new and improved DeFi.org website!

The team went all-in on the WOW factor with the new website homepage - Enter the DeFi.org lounge, click on the interactive hotspots and explore the exciting tools and features of DeFi.org.

The new website contains thought leadership about the world of DeFi - from defining practical decentralization to navigating the markets with a set of analytics tools, a new page dedicated to our activities on TON, and more…

So what are you waiting for?! Check out the new website here: https://defi.org/

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DeFi.org is a community of DeFi thought leaders. Together we are building an ecosystem of fully decentralized financial applications on leading L1 blockchains like Ethereum and TON. We educate, invest, accelerate and build. Powered by the Orbs Network.

Join the defi.org Telegram group and follow us on Twitter for more updates!