Cardano's Founding Entity Emurgo to Invest Over $200M to Boost Ecosystem

SINGAPORE — Cardano development lab Emurgo will invest over $200 million to support the ecosystem’s growth over the next three years, founder Ken Kodama told CoinDesk on the sidelines of the ongoing Token 2049 conference on Thursday.

Emurgo is a founding entity of the Cardano protocol and develops products, services and applications meant to support the growth of the network.

The funds, which are from Emurgo’s own capital, will be provided to projects directly building atop Cardano and to projects from other networks that build products that integrate Cardano’s network alongside their own.

Kodama said $100 million will be earmarked for investments in Africa under Emurgo’s African investment initiative. He explained that a key growth driver in the region was the use of lending and borrowing crypto services meant for daily life, as opposed to speculative purposes.

Kodama acknowledged that the growth of the Cardano network had been relatively slow compared with other networks. However, he added that Cardano was now ready with the infrastructure needed to safely expand and grow the network in the coming years.

Earlier this month, Cardano's long-awaited Vasil hard fork went live. The fork will allow the use of smart contracts and decentralized applications (dapps), which run on a blockchain system without a central administrator, on the network.

Blockchain networks Near and Avalanche have launched their own ecosystem funds to support the growth of and developments on their networks.