MakerDAO launches $45m Stable Fund

MakerDAO, the company behind the DAI stablecoin, and decentralised web builders L4, are together launching the Stable Fund, a $45 million fund that will provide developers using Dai with initial capital and help business development.

The Dai stablecoin by MakerDAO is solving the biggest barrier to adoption of blockchain technology - volatility. Shortly after launch, it maintained the target price of $1 when the industry market capitalization went down 30%+ multiple times. L4 is building core infrastructure for the decentralized web, sometimes called "Web 3"; Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin is an advisor to the project.

The Stable Fund provides free grants of up to $25,000, and investments of up to $200,000. When developers are looking for more capital to grow, the plan is to provide introductions to top tier investors best suited for their project.

The Stable Fund will be led by L4 Co-Founder Panashe Mahachi. A longtime Maker community member that founded Scanate, one of the first hands-on crypto funds.

Rune Christensen, Founder of MakerDAO, said: "We are looking for projects with a strong technical founder that, given the current state of blockchain technology, are imminently usable. We'll fund projects regardless of their current stage, but we look for different key metrics at each phase of the development process."

Christensen provided some outlines:

Idea Stage —  Why are you building what you're building? Have you done anything in the past to lead us to believe you can make your vision a reality? Will no one else solve this, if you don't solve it?

Beta Stage— Have you proved your early users love your product? We care less about number of users and more about how much they love it.

Post Launch — How fast are you growing on a weekly basis? Are regular people willing to deal with Ethereum's current problems in order to use your product?

"In addition to projects that leverage the benefits of Dai directly, we're putting major emphasis on projects that use the underlying Maker infrastructure to create disruptive financial applications. We've already seen people use CDPs to repay mortgages and believe this is only the tip of the iceberg. We're confident that many other interesting applications are just waiting to be created — applications that will improve the lives of everyday people," he said.

For inspiration, his team for launched a Request for Startups. This page will be frequently updated with ideas they feel have yet to be executed properly.

The Stable Fund will give developers building on the Maker platform a considerable amount of support. Having L4 as a trusted and well connected partner, who will work closely with developers, lowers the amount of time it will take for projects to reach fruition.