NearPad raises 2.5 million seed round for DAO led DeFi hub
NearPad has closed $2.5m seed round for the development of our DAO-led DeFi hub on Aurora. With participation from NGC, NEAR Foundation, OWC, Ellipti, LD Capital, Flow Ventures, SuperNova Fund, Genblock Capital, Arkn and several other parties, the raise crystalizes the alignment of goals between NearPad and leading players in the industry to catalyse growth on NEAR blockchain.
By building a DeFi ecosystem where developers can directly launch products to communities that will utilise it and users access tools to better leverage their portfolio, NearPad has set out to tap into NEAR’s latent potential to find and nurture the juggernauts of tomorrow.
NEAR’s Blockchain ecosystem is yet to take its place in the limelight the same way other blockchains have. Its negligible fees, instant finality, speedy block time, and intuitive tooling potential continues to be one of the most critically lauded but rarely leveraged potentials in the industry. With the launch of its EVM compatible chain, Aurora, the ecosystem is now being empowered with familiar tooling for developers and users to replicate the success of other blockchains for a fraction of the cost with none of the scaling woes.
Strategically aligning with NEAR ecosystem’s stalwarts, innovative funds in the space with proven track records, angels, and developer communities, NearPad is tapping into a rich well of experiences and resources for bootstrapping Web 3.0 ecosystems on NEAR blockchain.
“NearPAD brings the best of both worlds to early projects,” says NEAR Foundation, “Projects and their community members can hold ERC-20 tokens to take advantage of capital flow within the ETH economy. While still getting the dynamic benefits of NEAR: lower fees and fast finality of transactions.”
“We have already seen projects like 1inch, Chainlink, Band Protocol, SnowSwap, and more collaborating with Aurora and believe with the launch of NearPad, Aurora will be able to accelerate its growth of DeFi projects on Aurora even further. We look forward to working with the NearPad team to expand the DeFi ecosystem beyond Ethereum and bring further adoption and usability to the space.”
The raised fund will be used to build out the features on our roadmap, expand the development team to enable us to ship faster and optimize products better, incubate, and market rather than leaning on the public raise and/or treasury.
Unlike most startups, we want to empower our community and put them squarely in the driver seat. The public raise and the treasury will be governed by the community, meaning everything from who and when to seed liquidity to acquiring additional talents, expanding marketing, and incentivizing partnership. As core contributors to protocol development, ecosystem requirements and developmental needs will first be proposed to the community and put to vote.
