AVA Labs will invest millions in a merger between DeFi and traditional finance

Now that the public testnet is active, Emin Gun Sirer's AVA Labs want to invest heavily in building a more suitable DeFi space for them.

AVA Labs COO Kevin Sekniqi said the company was focusing its energies on a new grant program, made available through its venture capital arm, AVA X, which will provide funding of up to 250,000 to selected projects that use its technology.

The AVA plan

The AVA platform is a highly scalable protocol with a request for thousands of transactions per second, designed to be the basis for a new type of financial infrastructure. Founded by Professor Cornell Emin Gun Sirer, who previously worked on a scalability solution for Bitcoin listing, AVA had been on a private testnet for over a year.

Initially, the launch was scheduled for December 2019, then it was postponed to April 2020. Currently, the project is aiming for a full launch next July.Sekniqi said that since the public testnet launch earlier this month, the team has talked to at least five projects interested in applying for grants.

AVA has even started proselytizing, offering its vision of how the future decentralized space of finance (DeFi) should be born. "In (DeFi) there is nothing really decentralized," said Sekniqi.

DeFi, he added, is equally susceptible to people and fallible relationships built on trust just like traditional finance. Left to itself, DeFi would rediscover all the "basic tools known for many years" in traditional finance.

Changing the narrative from decentralization to "programmable capital" will attract "finance guys" with the knowledge and experience to realize its potential, he said. "In traditional finance you could have corporate bonds but they wouldn't be modular with anything else .

This is very senseless and very fragmented, "said Sekniqi. "DeFi is really based on the modularity of these financial products", allowing different assets to interact with each other in a simple way, sometimes for the first time.

A fusion of brains

In addition to the grant program, AVA is running hackathons for students, some targeted specifically at building new finance applications. The company plans to invite some "very influential" financial experts, many of whom are outside the blockchain space, to judge which products are most useful.

One of these events, announced Thursday, April 23, will offer $ 50,000 in cash prizes to students who can build infrastructure tools, identify and fix bugs, or develop "new applications for financial products and services."

Through grants and hackathons, Sekniqi said that AVA hopes to conduct a "brain fusion" that brings together those of traditional finance with those of the blockchain. "Personally, I don't know any financial experts who are currently working on Defi … there are only many innovative technologists," said Sekniqi.

Regardless of the reason behind it, the point is that "no one else is doing it right now," he said, adding that AVA could finally fill this gap of opportunity.