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Injective Labs will use the funds to support projects in such as decentralized finance (DeFi), interoperability, scalability solutions, Proof-of-Stake (PoS) infrastructure.
On Wednesday, January 24, Injective Labs, the Layer-1 blockchain focused on building financial applications, secured $150 million in funding to boost the ecosystem initiative. The funding comes at a time when the crypto market, especially the DeFi space, has witnessed major turbulence over the last year.
Injective Labs stated that they would use these funds to boost the adoption of DeFi and interoperable infrastructure. The Injective Labs funding round was led by some of the prominent Web3 players such as Kraken Ventures, Pantera Capital, KuCoin Ventures, Jump Crypto, Flow traders, Delphi Labs, and IDG Capital.
These members will focus on backing projects across diverse sectors such as decentralized finance (DeFi), interoperability, scalability solutions, Proof-of-Stake (PoS) infrastructure. The consortium will also support equity investments in addition to cryptographic research, technical development, marketing, community growth, etc. Speaking on the development, Injective Labs CEO and co-founder, Eric Chen, said:
“We’ve seen a lot of ecosystem funds in the past do various things, but there isn’t really an established ecosystem fund for Injective and Cosmos as a whole. We call it a venture consortium because they can get investments from there or direct institutions. Developer activity on Injective is rapidly increasing with major projects and this new ecosystem fund will provide unmatched opportunities for new builders entering Web3 and the Cosmos ecosystem overall.”
Injective Labs Growth
After being incubated by Binance Labs in 2018, Injective Labs has been backed by Jump Capital, Pantera Capital, etc. The last year 2022, it also secured $40 million in an institutional funding round from Brevan Howard Digital and Jump Capital.
Having secured recent funding, Injective Labs seek to support projects build on Injective or the Cosmos blockchains in trading, DeFi, interoperability, etc. Chen added:
“It will start backing early-stage projects then slowly move from seed to later stages as the ecosystem grows as a whole. With the launch of this consortium, we are going to kick off this ecosystem fund with a hackathon to bring in investors and backers. This will basically introduce a lot more opportunities for consortium members as well.”
Ahead this year in March, Injective Labs is hosting a Global Virtual Hackathon which is a four-week online event and will offer $1 million in grants, prizes, and investments.