Flamingo Finance is building the infrastructure for DeFi in the Neo ecosystem. Steven Liu, Neo Foundation technologist and Flamingo tech lead, talks about this in episode 49 of the Neo News Today podcast.

Since 2017, Neo’s vision has centered on the smart economy, the digitization and management of assets. Cultivating this vision, the Neo ecosystem fostered non-custodial exchanges and a stablecoin project. But Liu and his colleagues at Neo Global Development asked, “How can Neo help build infrastructure for DeFi?”

The Flamingo platform is incubated by NGD, which has allowed the team to build a DeFi platform with unique characteristics. Through the Poly Network interoperability protocol, Flamingo offers cross-chain swapping with Neo, Ethereum, and Switcheo. Flamingo also serves as a protocol cluster that allows users to swap, wrap, stake, vote, and soon trade in one platform. 

To date, Flamingo has been fully developed in-house, although Liu and the Flamingo team don’t want to be the arbiters of decentralized finance in the Neo ecosystem. Instead, they envision developers from within the community building upon the foundation NGD has laid. According to Liu:

Flamingo is not [building] everything for Neo. Just the infrastructure, the basic things that provide liquidity and [allow users] users [to wrap] assets from other blockchains to Neo. I think on Flamingo, [the] developers and communities can do a lot of the work, [with things like] a lending and borrowing system, insurance, [and] oracles.

To improve upon the infrastructure, Flamingo recently passed FIP #2. The FIP is for a significant upgrade to restore the value pegging between cross-chain assets and original collateral assets, and for future-proofing the platform for additional asset flow design changes. The FIP passed with around 11% of total FLM voting in favor, against the requirement of just over 3%.

Ultimately, Liu notes, his vision for Flamingo is to “be the entrance [for] users and traders to join the new DeFi world, and connect real-world financial activity with the blockchain world.”

The full NNT podcast episode can be found below: