We're commited to never charge for listings, nor for special priority to any project or chain, nor for any change to our methodology. Through the years we've received many offers from projects for grants, and while we reject most because they could lead to conflicts of interest, we've accepted some, making sure that none of these come with any commitment for us to give preference to any project or ecosystem.
In the spirit of transparency here's a list of funding sources, so our users can be aware of any potential conflicts of interest:
- AAVE gave us a retroactive grant with no commitments from our side
- Synthetix participated in a gitcoin round as a matching partner where we got donations.
- We've received money in multiple gitcoin rounds, there we got money from direct donations and from matching.
- We received donations to our public address directly.
- We received a large grant from Optimism (with no commitments) and we've participated in two OP retroactive funding rounds. Combined, these account for most of our funding.
- We previously shut down our bridges section and layerzero offered to cover the salary of a dev for a few months to add the section back in and maintain it.
- Pyth gave us a grant for improving the UI on the oracles page, namely adding a CSV download, listing the chains supported by each and adding chain-level pages. We made sure that it was clear that we wouldn't give them special preference, listings, or alter methodologies in any way because of this.
- LlamaSwap, our DEX meta-aggregator, earns money from kickbacks that aggregators send us from their revenue that comes from the volume we route through them.
- Self-funding.
- WePiggy airdropped us a small amount of their tokens (worth <2k$) in their token launch
I've compiled this list from memory so it might not include absolutely everything, however it absolutely includes everything that's significant.
- DefiLlama hasn't made any investments
- I, 0xngmi, avoid making angel investments (mainly cause I think it's bad for alignment between me and other people working at defillama), and the only crypto angel investment I've done is in Hooga Gaming as it was created by some friends. I'm not an advisor anywhere.
This is correct as of today, 23rd may 2023.