TL;DR

Folks Finance is a quiet DeFi rebuild that started as one of Algorand’s earliest serious DeFi protocols and has since evolved into a multi‑chain capital‑efficiency platform. After a major V2 upgrade and a full token launch, FOLKS retraced back near its early trading range last month. This report breaks down what Folks Finance actually does, why it moved beyond Algorand, what changed in V2, how the token works, and why this protocol may be quietly positioning itself for the next DeFi cycle rather than chasing the previous one.

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Last year, Folks Finance barely registered on most people’s radar outside the Algorand ecosystem. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t trending. It wasn’t farming hype cycles or memetic narratives. It was just… there. Shipping. Fast forward to today, and Folks Finance looks like a very different project. Same name. Same core thesis. Very different execution footprint. We’re now looking at a protocol that started on Algorand, survived that ecosystem’s slow bleed, expanded into multiple EVM environments, launched a full V2 architecture, introduced a native token, and is currently sitting in an awkward but interesting spot. Roughly $80 M in TVL, a fully diluted valuation well above its circulating market cap, and a token price that’s retraced back near its early trading range. That combination usually scares people off. But it also tends to be where the best long‑term research lives.

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What’s Folks Finance?

Source: Folks Finance

At its core, Folks Finance is a lending and capital‑efficiency protocol. Users supply assets, borrow against them, and deploy capital across different strategies with an emphasis on cross‑chain flexibility and risk‑managed design. That description alone doesn’t make Folks Finance special—plenty of protocols do that. What makes it distinct is how it arrived there.

Folks Finance was not born as a generic Ethereum fork. It originated on Algorand, an ecosystem that prioritized performance and design elegance but struggled to retain liquidity and developers at scale. Folks Finance became one of Algorand’s flagship DeFi protocols by necessity, not by marketing. It had to be conservative, resilient, and function in an environment where liquidity was often thin and user incentives were limited. Those constraints shaped the protocol’s DNA.

Source: Folks Finance

As the broader DeFi market consolidated around EVM chains, Folks Finance decided to expand outward rather than die inward. That expansion now includes deployments or token presence across Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Base, and other emerging ecosystems like Monad. The common thread isn’t chain loyalty; it’s capital mobility. Folks Finance is positioning itself less as a “home‑chain” protocol and more as an infrastructure layer that follows liquidity wherever it goes.

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From Algorand to Multi‑Chain

It’s easy to frame Folks Finance’s expansion as a pivot away from Algorand. That’s not quite accurate. Algorand was the proving ground. It forced Folks Finance to think about efficiency, security, and governance early, without relying on mercenary liquidity. When that environment stopped being viable for growth, the protocol didn’t abandon its principles—it exported them.

Source: Folks Finance

The move into EVM‑compatible ecosystems wasn’t about…

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