Are VC firms steering away from Cardano?

A day back, Paul Manuel — the Chief Operating Officer of metaverse project Pavia — took Twitter to claim that venture capital firms were distancing themselves away from Cardano.

He said, “I’ve had a number of conversations with VCs over the last few months. When we mention we are building on Cardano they have winced and said ‘Ewww no thanks. We may be in the business of risk, but not risk upon risk!‘”

I’ve had a number of conversations with VCs over the last few months. When we mention we are building on #Cardano they have winced and said “Ewww no thanks. We may be in the business of risk, but not risk upon risk!”

😂 – Let THAT sink in

C’mon VCs. Where the trailblazers at?

— Paul Manuel | Pavia (@PaulManuel) November 22, 2022

Patrick Tobler, founder of the Cardano-based NFT minting platform NMKR, replied under the same thread and said,

“I literally received a mail from a VC yesterday writing ‘We will not be investing into startups related to Cardano’. It’s a big joke.“

Reverting back to the same, the founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson, mockingly said,

“I guess they’d rather deploy capital into Luna and FTX?”

On one hand, people from the community did not hold back from opining on how the on-going “tough days” are all “so tiresome”.

It really is, tough days for Cardano people, with the market treating all crypto the same, and as a risk asset, then FTX. Stay the course, one use case = one use case- keep building.

— Gauss (@RobertGauss5) November 23, 2022

On the other, others were trying to reason out why such was the case. A particular user tweeted,

“Jokes aside. Maybe time to understand why. Could it be as a payback because of all the negative comments by the Cardano community about VC funded L1s ? Or maybe they don’t invest in tech where the ROI is more than 3 years. Why doesn’t the foundation initiate an assessment.”

The number talk

Despite faring well on the development front and timely introducing new upgrades, critics like Mark Cuban continue to feel that other networks like Dogecoin have more utility than Cardano. The American entrepreneur has claimed in the past that “no one” outside of his Twitter ADA followers had ever told him that they use a particular app on Cardano. He also asserted that the visibility of the ecosystem’s games, DeFi, NFTs, etc. was only limited to the Cardano “church”.

Alongside, the ‘ghost chain‘ tag has time and again been associated with Cardano, and Hoskinson has repeatedly claimed that he was “tired” of people calling it so.

The number of projects building on the Cardano platform have increased by more than five-fold since December 2021. Towards the end of Q3, over 1,113 projects were being built on Cardano.

Alongside, there were 3,307 Plutus scripts and over 100 projects had already been launched on the blockchain. Furthermore, the Cardano network had overseen the minting of more than 6.1 million native tokens across 62,162 minting policies as of the end of September.