EMURGO, a global blockchain technology company providing solutions for developers, startups and governments, today announced the launch of two new investment vehicles in the Cardano ecosystem, each with a different focus but both aimed at building socially impactful solutions.
Emurgo Africa and Emurgo Ventures
During the recently concluded Cardano Summit, Emurgo, a founding partner of Cardano, announced the creation of a $100 million investment fund to support DeFi projects and NFT solutions.
These are products developed on the blockchain that include decentralized applications and for the training of blockchain developers.
In order to achieve the objectives and to better manage these funds, two separate entities have been created: Emurgo Africa and Emurgo Ventures.
The former aims to support more than three hundred regional startups through seed financing and incubation, to ensure that Cardano’s blockchain is adopted as a standard technology platform in Africa for social impact solutions.
The African continent has a high potential for cryptocurrency development and DeFi projects considering that most of the population is unbanked and the central financial system is inefficient.
Emurgo Africa has announced two important partnerships to rapidly expand the Cardano ecosystem in Africa and leverage the partners’ large trading networks.
Adanian Labs, an operator of venture building firms in Africa, and Adaverse, an accelerator programme, will work together to support startups that will strengthen and extend the Cardano ecosystem across the continent.
Emurgo Ventures focuses on developed markets and will be tasked with providing funding to innovative companies that engage Cardano in the development of their products and middleware solution companies, which could include NFT projects and decentralized finance platforms.
Emurgo Africa supports innovative startups
Its first investment was in Milkomeda, a sidechain project from dcSpark that links Cardano and other blockchain protocols and will use wrapped ADA (wADA) as a resource.
On these Cardano-centric initiatives, Emurgo CEO Ken Kodama said:
“We are more focused than ever on accelerating the development of Cardano’s ecosystem with a rich mix of decentralized services catering to a global community that is increasing in overall blockchain awareness”.
Charles Hoskinson, CEO of Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the company behind the development of Cardano, said:
“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”.
Cardano and growth strategies with Emurgo
These solutions, initiatives led by Emurgo Africa and Emurgo Ventures, are part of Cardano’s growth strategy introduced with the Alonzo hard fork earlier this month, which aims to leverage new smart contracts with the hope of increasing user adoption and use cases.
ADA is the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization with $68 billion. At the time of writing, Cardano’s price is $2.13 and it has seen an increase today of +0.77%, as reported by investing.com analysis.
Many believe that Cardano could be serious competition for Ethereum, especially with its market position and support from large financial players.
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