The $20 million venture capital firm makes its first allocation in FinTech payment platform COTI offering financial solutions to the crypto community.
On Tuesday, April 6, Cardano’s venture capital fund cFund made its first investment of half a million dollars in payments firm COTI. Cardano has earned a name for itself in the industry and its native cryptocurrency ADA is now the sixth-largest crypto with a market cap of $38.5 billion.
Cardano launched its cFund platform last year in July 2020. The fund is basically a joint venture between Los Angeles-based Wave Financial and Cardano builder IOHK. Also, the basic aim of the fund is to grow and expand the Cardano ecosystem.
On the other hand, COTI that attracted funds from cFund is a FinTech platform offering financial solutions for the cryptocurrency community. The platform also allows businesses to build their own payments system while digitizing any currency.
The teams at IOHK and Wave Financial have worked together in the past. This team helped payment platform COTI create the first version of ADA Pay in 2019. The Cardano blockchain network is likely to release its Shelley mainnet in the coming weeks. COTI CEO Shahaf Bar-Geffen said that they would be updating their payment platform for the mainnet release.
The decentralized finance (DeFi) space has seen massive growth over the last few months. The DeFi market cap has shot over $50 billion surging nearly 10x during the first quarter of 2021. Explaining their reason for collaborating with Cardano, Bar-Geffen said:
“There are a lot of new chains out there like Polkadot and Binance Smart Chain and so on, and they all more or less target the same crypto audience to do DeFi better and all of that. Rather than just doing just another faster or better version of Ethereum with the same DeFi projects on top, Cardano is trying to work with governments, specifically in developing countries in Africa and South America.”
One of the officials from Cardano stated that they have been supporters of Cardano for a very long time. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson shared his thoughts saying:
“We have tremendous respect for the COTI team and we are excited to deepen our relationship with this investment. COTI has been a great partner across several projects already, and we plan to leverage their advanced fintech architecture to enable future finance applications on ADA”.
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