Spinach is a liquid retrofunding platform that helps chains grow DEX TVL by running Spinach Competitions—a daily challenge for builders to orchestrate as much liquidity as possible for the token(s) that the chain wants to incentivize.

A growing problem across all ecosystems is that builder grants and liquidity incentives are fragmented and inefficient long term. Grants are hard to manage and don’t ensure commitment; liquidity incentives attract short-term capital.

Spinach solves this by combining both into one model, rewarding real impact, encouraging loyalty, and growing long-term TVL—all with low overhead and high efficiency.

Spinach competitions work as follows:

1. A Chain chooses a token whose DEX TVL they want to grow
2. The Chain allocates a daily incentive budget, e.g. $100
3. Spinach and the Chain announce to projects they can get part of this incentive budget by orchestrating liquidity against their token and the incentivized token
4. Projects then rally their community to grow this liquidity
5. On a daily basis at midnight, the Spinach protocol calculates the liquidity orchestrated per participating project; and
6. Then retroactively distributes rewards to the projects proportional to the liquidity they orchestrated per day

In alpha testing with Glo Dollar on the Celo chain Spinach achieved remarkable results. We found the Spinach approach has 3 benefits over direct liquidity incentives:

1. Noise machine - projects and their communities actively promote the competition
2. Core community - participants are true fans of your ecosystem and are here for the longterm, some liquidity providers are doing so for the first time purely because they are motivated to support projects they care about!
3. 2nd-order effects - projects often launch direct liquidity incentive programs of their own

These dynamics resulted in strong TVL growth metrics despite a limited budget. With a monthly reward budget of $2000, projects in the Celo ecosystem:

• Orchestrated $66k in TVL
• 8 projects participated
• 2 projects launched direct liquidity incentive programs for their users
• ~150 end users started providing liquidity

This prompted us to start exploring Spinach as a stand alone product. During the Eth Denver conference in February we spoke with half a dozen projects and chains which we believe might benefit from using Spinach. The response has been positive and encouraging of us to actually build it. We’ve started building an MVP and are now looking to raise funding to invest in a successful launch and growth strategy for Spinach in Q2 and Q3.

Mockup of Spinach leaderboard we're building