COTI Launches a $10 Million Fund for Ecosystem Development

The blockchain payments network COTI has unveiled COTI Ventures, which will focus on investing and capitalizing on the “upside opportunity” in the COTI ecosystem.

The initial budget is $10 million, directed towards equity, tokens, and other forms of capital in early-stage startups developing solutions associated with the COTI’s ecosystem.

COTI Ventures

As per the release shared with CryptoPotato, COTI’s Chief Financial Officer, Yair Lavi, and a team of analysts and researchers will spearhead the fund. They will be tasked with identifying opportunities for collaborations and analyzing ways to contribute to the COTI business model.

In addition to the initial investment, the team will also guide the selected projects and leverage expertise, connections as well as resources to assist them in achieving their business objectives.

COTI says that the focus is to churn out “strong and experienced founding teams with a robust business plan that rely on a great product-market fit and a quick time to market.” With this initiative, COTI joins the likes of  Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Sequoia, Bessemer, and Bain, which have established Web 3 and blockchain-focused funds.

While talking about his role in COTI Ventures, Lavi stated,

“I look forward to my new adventure as head of COTI Ventures. During my 4 years at COTI, I’ve seen our ecosystem, as well as our variety of products and services, grow tremendously, and the next evolution is to encourage new teams to work together with COTI by assisting them in their initial fund raising.”

The fund’s first investment was on Cardano-based DEX, WingRiders, while its second investment was in AdaSwap.

COTI’s Roadmap for 2022

Earlier this month, the open-source payment infrastructure program released its roadmap for 2022, wherein it revealed its plans to position itself as go-to Layer 1 for payments. With the DAG-powered Trustchain, COTI said it is building a Layer 1. It also intends on developing necessary instruments that could set the stage for mass adoption by offering wallets, banking solutions, processing tools, among other things.

COTI plans to expand from a one coin network to a Layer 1 that has the capacity to accommodate multiple tokens for consumers and merchants globally. Currently, it is developing MultiDAG 2.0, which is expected to hit the mainnet in the third quarter. The framework will enable COTI’s enterprise clients to issue stablecoins pegged to the value of real-world fiat currencies.