Cardano gets $100 million in funding to strengthen DeFi and NFT development

The commercial arm and investment vehicle of Cardano, EMURGO had announced to inject $100 million in funding to invest into the early startup and growth-stage companies. Emurgo is hoping to accelerate the growth of Cardano’s DeFi and NFT ecosystem after Cardano’s launch of the smart contract earlier this month.

EMURGO made this announcement during the ongoing Cardano Summit 2021. The capital will go towards growing Cardano’s ecosystem with smart contracts. The firm will focus on supporting startups working in DeFi and NFTs, and launch Cardano-centric education programs. The new investment vehicle will also focus on building socially impactful solutions powered by Cardano, through EMURGO Africa and EMURGO Ventures.

Also, read – Cardano partnered with Chainlink to provide oracle integration for smart contract developers

EMURGO Africa is planning to provide support to about 300 startups in the region through seed funding, mentorship, and incubation to ultimately have Cardano’s blockchain adopted as a mainstream technology. For this, they will partner with Adanian Labs, a venture building studio operator, and Adaverse, a Cardano-focused joint accelerator program.

EMURGO Ventures on the other hand will focus on other developed markets to accelerate the adoption of Cardano for building new projects on the blockchain. The venture will provide seed investments into companies building decentralized financial (DeFi) services, non-fungible token (NFT) projects, and blockchain developer education tools.

EMURGO’s investments will help to shape the future of the Cardano ecosystem, a maturing network with a creative and diverse community, growing smart contract capabilities and partnerships across the globe that provide social and financial services utilizing Cardano’s provably secure technology.

IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson

In the last few days Cardano, the 3rd largest cryptocurrency, has made multiple announcements and partnerships to build and strengthen investors’ and developers’ trust for the blockchain ecosystem. Major announcements from the summit include Cardano’s first stable coin in partnership with Coti, partnership with DISH’s telecom services, in an effort to boost adoption for the blockchain while transforming the entire model of the telecom industry, partnership with Veritree, the global land restoration, and tree planting verification company to secure its records using Cardano’s blockchain and more.

Emurgo’s 100 million funds will play a very crucial role in the ecosystem development that has just got more exciting after Alonzo hard fork which enabled smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain. However, we still see very slow adoption primarily due to scaling issues and the lack of resources for the developer community. But it is believed that DeFi projects will go live on the network once the teams have developed scaling solutions to adapt to Cardano’s eUTXO model.