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EMURGO, a blockchain solutions company and the commercial arm of Cardano, said it would invest over $100 million in the nascent Cardano DeFi ecosystem to help bolster user adoption and usecases. The announcement was made Sunday at the Cardano Summit 2021.
📣Just announced 🎉 EMURGO to invest $100M in @Cardano ecosystem to accelerate #DeFi, #NFT solutions and #blockchain education! – EMURGO CEO, @KenKodama_Biz @emurgo_io#CardanoSummit2021 $ADA pic.twitter.com/Gx4fbw556x
— EMURGO (@emurgo_io) September 26, 2021
“EMURGO to invest $100M in @Cardano ecosystem to accelerate #DeFi, #NFT solutions and #blockchain education!,” the company quoted CEO Ken Kodama as saying.
Kodama further stated, “Please contact us if you would like to receive investment funds, our network, information, and management support,” adding:
“We will create a dedicated operation from 2022.”
Cardano, and everyone, wants DeFi
DeFi—short for decentralized finance—is a financial ecosystem that relies on smart contracts and sophisticated code to provide peer-to-peer financial services to users. Early usecases included decentralized lending and trading, but these have since grown to include fractional asset investments and self-paying loans.
Most of today’s DeFi activity takes place on the Ethereum blockchain, followed by Solana, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, and others. But Cardano—which recently saw its first-ever smart contract rollout this month—is coming for a piece of that pie.
As such, the announcement comes on the back of similar moves made by Algorand, Fantom, and Kava in recent times—all arguably wanting to grow and popularize their own DeFi protocols over current market favorites.