Following more than two months of intensive scrutiny and evaluation, DeFi.org, in collaboration with layer-2 scaling solution Polygon and layer-3 blockchain infrastructure solution Orbs, has released the list of winning projects for its first round of the DeFi accelerator program.

Led by Polygon and Orbs, this DeFi accelerator program aims to empower new DeFi projects and protocols built using Polygon’s layer-2 and Orbs’ layer-3 infrastructure. More than one hundred projects participated in this program, each at a different stage of development. In addition to inspiring ideas and concepts, some submissions displayed impressive DeFi ingenuity, solid technology, and strong teams.

The DeFi.org accelerator program is focused on empowering projects that align with its core principles of fair distribution, community governance and ownership, strategic risk approach without compromising innovation, and sustainable economics alongside composability and interoperability.

Although each project demonstrated novel ideas and use-cases, after intensive reviews, live interviews, and due diligence, the evaluating committee has selected four projects – reBaked, Ithil, Prophet, and CURL- to spearhead the next wave of DeFi innovation. Each selected project will receive mentorship and firsthand assistance from DeFi.org’s mentors, access to liquidity injection and funding for bootstrap expenses, exposure to industry leaders and user communities, and a featured listing on the DeFi.org website and other select venues.

A New Wave Of DeFi 2.0 Projects

Among the selected projects, Ithil is a novel DeFi solution designed to facilitate complex strategies with a single click for DeFi users using their personal or borrowed funds across different external protocols. Ithil aims to enable users to earn single-sided APY on a wide range of tokens while ensuring stable and sustainable yields across all market conditions. Users can create their customized investment portfolio using the platform’s diverse range of risk-diversified boosted strategies.

The next project, CURL, aims to solve the shortcomings of the current DeFi ecosystem, primarily the challenges of fragmented liquidity, inefficient liquidity allocations, and convoluted user experience. CURL serves as the homogenized synthetic liquidity protocol across layer-2 synthetic assets. The platform uses a curve-style liquidity pooling model while powering the issuance of universal synthetic assets, thereby offering a weighted exposure to all available layer-2 synths, effectively making them all fungible.

Meanwhile, Prophet is positioning itself as a decentralized marketplace for automated DeFi investment strategies. Anyone can list their strategies on the marketplace in a trustless and cost-efficient manner or invest in strategies listed by other users. Every strategy listed on the Prophet marketplace grants its developers the right to earn a management fee from users who use them.

Finally, there’s reBaked – an infrastructure solution building a wide range of collaboration mechanisms, growth tools, governance infrastructure, and revenue sharing agreements for the Web3 and DAO ecosystems. With reBaked, Web3 projects will garner access to multiple built-in tools and solutions that can help them deploy faster, achieve shared goals, and ensure better value returns for stakeholders.