Emurgo, the financial arm of Cardano, a leading cryptocurrency project, has announced a $100 million investment in the development of decentralized finance-based products for the ecosystem. For this purpose, the company will establish two subsidiaries, one of which will be solely dedicated to incentivizing the formation of African startups that use the Cardano blockchain in the development of their products.
Cardano will drive the ecosystem with $100M
Emurgo, Cardano’s financial arm, intends to direct $100 million to two new investment vehicles to kickstart the development of Cardano-related products. The subsidiaries will have different focuses, but they will both help to expand the Cardano ecosystem.
The first, Emurgo Ventures, will be in charge of providing seed funding to promising companies that use Cardano in the development of their products. These products could include NFT platforms and decentralized finance (defi) platforms, which would take advantage of the newly developed capabilities enabled by the Cardano blockchain.
Ken Kodama, CEO of Emurgo, stated:
“We are more focused than ever on accelerating the development of Cardano’s ecosystem by providing a diverse set of decentralized services to a global community that is becoming more aware of blockchain technology.”
Putting Africa first
Cardano’s representatives have a clear goal: to be the first to capitalize on Africa’s potential for adopting cryptocurrency-based solutions. This is because the region suffers from financial inefficiencies and has a high proportion of unbanked residents.
To meet this demand, Emurgo has established Emurgo Africa as its second subsidiary. This subsidiary’s goal is to support 300 startups in the region through seed funding and incubation in order to make Cardano one of the most widely used chains in the region. According to statements, this funding will prioritize projects that use Cardano to provide socially impactful solutions over other types of projects.
All of these solutions are aimed at creating a rich decentralized finance ecosystem that takes advantage of the new smart contracts features introduced by the chain with the Alonzo hard fork earlier this month. The goal is to create a vibrant defi ecosystem that can compete with other solutions that are already well-known through their platforms, such as Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche.
Final thoughts
Cardano has a goal of changing the world, and they’ve begun that work, to a large extent in Africa. Yet, news of the investment into DeFi projects wasn’t met with much excitement in the market as Cardano continues to drop. The ADA native coin is trading at $2.07 at the time of this article and is down 7.11% for the week.
Jay Speakman is a technology writer based in San Francisco, California. He writes on the topics of blockchain, cryptocurrency, DeFi and other disruptive technologies. Clients include Avalanche, Be[in]Crypto, Trust Machines and several blogs devoted to blockchain gaming. He will not rest until fiat currency is defeated.
