Avalanche Launches New $200M Investment Fund
- The “Blizzard” fund received contributions from the Avalanche Foundation, Ava Labs, Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Dragonfly Capital, CMS Holdings, and others.
- The main focus of the fund will be early-stage projects focused on DeFi, enterprise applications, NFTs, and culture applications, though it will also support “emerging use cases”.
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The Avalanche Foundation has unveiled a new $200 million investment fund aimed at attracting more developers to the Avalanche blockchain, Avalanche said in a blog post on 1 November.
According to the announcement, the so called “Blizzard” fund has received contributions not only from the Avalanche Foundation and Ava Labs, but also from investors such as Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Dragonfly Capital, CMS Holdings, Republic Capital, R/Crypto Fund, Collab+Currency, Lvna Capital, and Finality Capital Partners. The main aim of the fund will be early-stage projects in the areas of decentralized finance (DeFi), enterprise applications, NFTs, and culture applications. The fund will also support other emerging use cases, such as security token issuances, liquidity providers, and self-sovereign identity. The Director of the Avalanche Foundation, Emin Gün Sirer, said in a statement:
“The last two months have shown incredible growth across Avalanche, with users, assets, and applications joining the community in record-highs. Blizzard will play a key role in further accelerating this growth, and solidifying Avalanche’s position as the premiere home for projects and people pioneering the next era in our space.”
The Blizzard program will not only offer projects support through equity investments and token purchases, but will also provide assistance with community building, marketing, and other kinds of operational support.
This is not the first big fund the Avalanche Foundation has released to boost the popularity of the Avalanche blockchain. Back in August the Foundation announced “Avalanche Rush”, a $180 million liquidity mining incentive program designed to target blue-chip DeFi applications and introduce them to Avalanche. Data from DeFi Llama shows that on 19 August, when the program was announced, the total value locked (TVL) on Avalanche was around $337.4 million, but a month later it was sitting at $3.12 billion, and today at around $8.49 billion.
- The newly launched ecosystem fund is backed by Pantera Capital, Kraken Ventures, Jump Crypto, Kucoin Ventures, Delphi Labs, Flow Traders, Gate Labs and IDG Capital.
- Highest priority will be given to interoperability and DeFi projects, but the fund will also support developers that are building trading platforms, scalability solutions, and PoS infrastructure.
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- MetaMask Bridges was designed to aggregate multiple blockchain bridges in one place, making it easier and more secure for users to transfer their assets from one network to another.
- The new feature currently supports the Ethereum, Avalanche, BNB Chain, and Polygon blockchains, as well as the Connext, Hop, Celer cBridge, and Polygon Bridge.
- The fund is the first in Binance Labs’ history to be created with outside capital, namely from DST Global Partners, Breyer Capital, unnamed private equity funds, and others.
- The new $500 million fund will invest in cryptocurrency companies in three stages of development, from incubation, to early-stage venture, and finally late-stage growth.