Decentralized finance alliance Open DeFi has announced it will create a decentralized autonomous organization to support its vision for an open and global cross-chain DeFi ecosystem.
The alliance launched in late 2020 with the goal of bringing together Western and Eastern DeFi projects and has since seen some of the sector’s top projects join its ranks, including Aave, Synthetix and Balancer.
The responsibilities of the Open DeFi DAO, or OD DAO, will include launching DeFi products across multiple layer-one networks and exploring multi-chain applications for emerging decentralized assets, including data tokens and nonfungible tokens.
The DAO will also incubate early-stage protocols and infrastructure and seek to “generate long-term value through community-based strategies.” Open DeFi’s Marek Laskowski stated:
“The goal of Open DAO is to develop a truly integrated multi-chain DeFi ecosystem that will open up liquid markets and establish a new operating system for finance. With the support of our members and our community of more than 10,000 DeFi developers and strategists worldwide, we look forward to accelerating the next generation of DeFi.”
The DAO will be community-governed through a governance token, with an announcement emphasizing that “anyone can join” the permissionless organization.
To celebrate the new DAO and support decentralized finance developments, Open DAO and Gitcoin launched a hackathon on Monday. The event is sponsored by more than 20 major DeFi projects including Uniswap and Polygon, with more than $100,000 in prizes to be awarded to the hackathon’s winners.
Open DeFi was launched by blockchain startup Conflux Network in September 2020 with support from the Chinese central government’s Shanghai and Technology Committee, describing its mission as bridging the Eastern and Western decentralized finance markets. By November, the alliance had doubled its membership to span 16 firms, including four of the 20-largest DeFi protocols by total value locked.
In addition to several decentralized finance heavyweights, Open DeFi’s membership currently includes notable actors within the broader crypto sector including fundraising platform Gitcoin and venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
Decentralized autonomous organizations have seen tremendous growth over the past six months, with the combined assets under management of the DAO ecosystem increasing more than 600% from $140 million as of Nov. 5, 2020, to roughly $1 billion today, according to data provider DeepDAO.
DeepDAO currently tracks 108 different DAOs, 24 of which hold more than $1 million in assets, and 17 comprise more than 100 members.