Polkadot has become the latest Ethereum competitor to launch a decentralized finance alliance.

Announced on Dec. three, the alliance aims to overcome the decentralized nature of the Polkadot ecosystem, providing a platform for its community to hash out using the Polkadot Network and its underlying Substrate technology stack for DeFi.

Oracle network Chainlink is amongst the alliance'southward founding members. The company's global head of business development, Dan Kochis, said:

"Chainlink is excited to aid steer the direction of Polkadot's growing ecosystem of decentralized financial applications. Past promoting programmer best practices for DeFi protocols, the Polkadot ecosystem tin become stronger than ever."

Other founding members include layer-2 technology provider Plasm Network, decentralized insurance market Tidal Finance, and non-custodial automated market maker Polkaswap.

The alliance is currently accepting applications from developers building on Polkadot Network or Substrate.

Polkadot has also merely announced it will exist launching a "thousand validators" plan this calendar month, which volition offering support and incentives to individuals seeking to run a Polkadot node in a bid to bolster the number of its validators by 1,000.

The programme draws on the same plan that was launched on Polkadot'southward sister network and parachain Kusama in February. While Kusama's node count was approaching 180 in February, the network at present has 700 active validators with a further 393 waiting.

Despite two-thirds of Polkadot's supply being staked, the network currently comprises just 249 validators — indicating that many stakers are choosing to apply third-political party service providers.