We’re announcing Velocity Labs - an ecosystem builder and venture studio looking to build the necessary infrastructure for a thriving DeFi ecosystem on Polkadot.
While our ultimate purpose is to create groundbreaking DeFi products that showcase Polkadot’s remarkable power, scalability, and interoperability, we acknowledge that there are essential prerequisites for realizing Polkadot’s full potential.
Within the numerous pain points that have been pointed out by the community, we see the issues around composability and accessibility as the biggest head winds for Polkadot’s DeFi ecosystem to date.
Composability: Shared security and XCM enable Polkadot to have interoperability across chains. The composability that comes from this is extremely powerful and unique to Polkadot but has been mostly underutilized. Today’s interoperability use cases across the ecosystem revolve mostly around token transfers between parachains with few exceptions of complex cross-parachains functionalities. We have yet to see the vision of XCM as the most comprehensive interoperability feature being reflected at the application layer. Our team has seen this first hand as parachain founders and operators and can attest to the many improvements that can be contributed to address this.
Accessibility: Accessing our ecosystem has always been rather complex for both liquidity and users. The wide range of parachain tokens needed to pay gas in addition to existential deposit features which are foreign to new Polkadot users add to the already complex architecture that Polkadot has. We have yet to provide a smooth onboarding experience for users trying to enter both from other networks and off-chain origins like CEXs or bank accounts.
Our Approach
Our primary focus is to productize the Polkadot stack and develop the necessary infrastructure. This will unlock a thriving DeFi ecosystem, providing a seamless onboarding experience and enabling unique DeFi applications that abstract away the cross-chain infrastructure that their build on top of.
At Velocity Labs, we plan on delivering through in-house development as well as coordinating funding for builders to achieve the following:
- Develop new or improve existing Tooling and APIs that enhance accessibility and UX on Polkadot, including products that complement and highlight XCM use cases
- User interfaces, dApps, and unique products that leverage the capabilities of Polkadot’s architecture by unlocking the full potential of system parachains like AssetHub and BridgeHub
In parallel, we will double down on our work representing Polkadot’s interests with businesses and institutional partners by:
- Supporting technical and commercial relationships between CEXs, on/off ramps, custodians and asset issuers for Polkadot.
- Acting as the business development (BD) partner for parachains, dApps, bridges, asset issuers, wallets, and more.
By placing our focus and resources on these pressing issues, we believe Velocity Labs can help to unlock the next generation of applications that can only be built on top of Polkadot.
Who we are
Velocity Labs is a collaborative effort founded by parachain founders and former Parity team members. Nicolas Arevalo, former DeFi Lead at Parity we’ll be leading the team with Alexei Zamayatin (Co-Founder Interlay), Jakub Gregus (Co-Founder HydraDX) and Lucas Vogelsang (Co-Founder Centrifuge) as advisors to Velocity Labs.
Our founding team has already brought to market different ecosystem initiatives such as the On/Off Ramp Bounty, the Polkadot Assurance Legion (PAL) and the treasury funded Axelar Pallet. With Velocity we’ll have a platform to continue solving critical issues in our ecosystem with a nimble and ambitious team of ecosystem agents.
We’ll be providing further announcements in the coming weeks both through the Polkadot Forum as well as our Twitter account (https://twitter.com/v_labs)
