Hedera Launches Another $250M Fund Targeting The Metaverse

By Kevin • April 7, 2022 11:41 am • Comments

The HBAR Foundation is putting its capital to use by recently launching another fund to target development in the metaverse sector with $250M in funds allocated this time.

This recent announcement follows the company’s previous launch of a $155M fund that focused specifically on the decentralized finance sector.

With the launch of this second fund, the company is hoping to gain market share for business to business and business to consumer projects that live within the metaverse.

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Recent reports from industry experts have previously estimated that the market cap of the metaverse could reach record levels by 2030 and Hedera’s recent move is positioning the blockchain to take advantage of that growth.

CoinDesk reports:

The metaverse fund targets business-to-consumer and business-to-business-to-consumer projects that Hedera hopes will bring users into Web 3 and its ecosystem, with a focus on “gaming and virtual worlds, consumer brands and collectibles, sports and fan engagement and enterprise metaverse,” according to a press release.

Hedera is known for its blockchain-esque distributed ledger technology (DLT), which was recently made Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible.

With a package of large token incentives, the network’s backers are looking to attract applications that have clicked on other chains.

“We see this whole metaverse area as a bit of a catch-all for the apps bringing in new users into Web 3,” Alex Russman, a vice president at the HBAR Foundation, told CoinDesk in an interview. “I see 2021 as the year of NFTs, and 2022 as the year of their enterprise applications.”

So far, capital from this new fund is already being utilized towards projects that would be utilized in the metaverse.

For example, capital had been allocated to a company called “Sayl” which is a company that helps with the development of NFT items for well-known consumer brands.

The company already has a sizeable amount of partnerships with hundreds of companies and the capital provided from the fund would likely accelerate the amount of partnerships to potentially over a thousand.

Hedera has stated that they are specifically focusing on fashion and gaming which have so far been proven to be the most popular use cases within the metaverse.

As a result, the company has been focused on forming partnerships with gaming and fashion companies which includes gaming giant Ubisoft which is on Hedera’s governing council.

Yahoo expands on the details:

The first grant from the new fund went to Sayl, a company that helps brands use non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and that has partnerships with more than 300 companies, according to the press release.

Russman told CoinDesk two areas of particular interest for Hedera are virtual fashion and gaming, sectors the company already feels well-connected with.

One of the 39 companies on Hedera’s “Governance Council,” a group assembled to oversee the network’s operations and strategy, is gaming giant Ubisoft, which joined the council a little over a month after its own NFT debacle in December.

By being one of the first blockchain projects to allocate this amount of capital to these two emerging sectors, HBAR investors are expecting organic growth to accelerate within the coming 1-2 years.

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