Hopefully you’ve heard of Project Catalyst, an experiment that is owned and run by the Cardano community. It is funded by the Cardano Treasury and its purpose is to support growth and development of the Cardano ecosystem. Perhaps you’ve also heard of EMURGO, which provided some early funding for the development of Cardano. Now there’s something new in the mix: earlier this summer, IOG (then IOHK) quietly launched cFund.
CFund is a traditional “early-stage sector-agnostic venture firm in the Blockchain industry” according to the website. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson and IOG CFO Jeff Pollack sit on the board of cFund. The fund itself is being managed by Wave Financial, based in London and Los Angeles. Both IOG and Wave Financial contributed to the $20M seed. The goal of the firm is to back BIG, ambitious projects that are building on Cardano. They are looking to bring “world-changing ideas and solutions to market” quickly.
One of the first projects to be backed by the fund was COTI. COTI is a venture which aims to raise crypto to the same levels of recognition and acceptance as fiat (“regular”) money. This means making it easier for people and businesses to use cryptocurrencies for payments, donations, and remittance. That’s a huge goal, with an even bigger potential impact! The COTI project received 500,000 USD from cFund. Other projects receiving early funding from cFund include dcSpark and Occam.
cFund isn’t really a secret, but it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention in headlines and social chatter. We think it deserves some excitement! The launch of cFund means there are now 3 independent firms funding the development ecosystem for Cardano.
If you have a “world-changing” idea that would benefit from the wisdom of a traditional venture firm and which requires more funding than what you may be able to receive via Project Catalyst, cFund might be a good entity to approach. The largest awarded single payment amount via Project Catalyst to date is $119,000, awarded to Liqwid Protocol for performing security audits on their upcoming lending and liquidity DApp. Bigger ideas will require bigger funding amounts, and now the ecosystem is geared up to grow.
The creation of cFund and their initial investment in COTI underscore the Cardano commitment to a future that is for everyone. Legacy systems are not going to be thrown out, so it’s great that Cardano is providing trusted onramps for these systems to be onboarded and upgraded.
Thank you Lido. You are always keeping us up to date with project catalyst information. For a new member to cardano you are extremely helpful.
Sorry I left my comment prior but did not post my Twitter handle instead of email. Thank you for always keeping us up to date with what’s going on beyond nfts.
I love this article