Polymesh Offers $25M in Developer Grants to Kick-Start Security Token Projects

Polymesh, a blockchain built specifically for regulated tokenized securities, has unveiled a grant program for developers backed by some 50 million of its native POLYX tokens, worth around $25 million in today’s money.

Polymesh chief Graeme Moore said the platform’s GitHub will contain a list of requests for proposals, but developers can submit their own ideas, too. The Polymesh grant program will foster developer firepower for things like a tokenized exchange, cross-chain settlement engine, wallet integrations and a finance-oriented block explorer.

Budding blockchains face a chicken-and-egg problem when it comes to getting an ecosystem of developers building on a new platform. Offering grants and incentive programs has been a successful strategy for layer 1, or base, blockchains like Avalanche, for instance, which announced a $180 million program last summer.

“People want to build infrastructure on Polymesh because it’s a blockchain built for regulated assets, but the amount of use cases and the amount of users is still admittedly in its early days,” said Moore in an interview. “So how do you solve that? You bootstrap it by incentivizing developers to build applications on the blockchain.”

Read more: Polymath to Launch Blockchain Built for Tokenized Stocks

The tokenized security space is now moving forward at pace, with banks and the like, whose interest was piqued back in 2017, now seeing hardened technology emerging with sufficient regulatory guardrails in place.

Polymesh is meant to support the trading of virtually any kind of physical or digital asset deemed a security, said Moore. That could include everything from traditional stocks to racehorses, artwork and commercial real estate.

“Our thesis at Polymesh is that all of the world’s financial securities will be on the blockchain at some point in time,” Moore said. “We’re at the forefront of building the base layer infrastructure so that these folks can build applications that meet their needs on top. It’s really just a matter of when, not if.”