Dapper Labs, the company behind the NBA Top Shot platform and creator of the Flow blockchain, announced the launch of a $725 million fund to develop the Flow ecosystem. The fund is aimed to focus on processing and evolving products in gaming, DeFi, and other web3 content. For now, it is the largest joint fund organized for a blockchain.
“This is the largest multi-investor fund for any blockchain. Funds will be allocated both to projects already working on Flow and to developers of new ones,” Flow representatives commented on the fund creation on Twitter.
Thus, 17 venture capital firms, including a16z, Spartan, Coatue, CoinFund, Square Ventures, Greenfield One, Liberty City Ventures, and others have had a hand in the fund's creation. As part of this initiative, it is planned to reward 7,500 both already working developers and attract new ones, especially those dealing with NFT and content creation. Teams developing NBA Top Shot and UFC Strike, as well as those dealing with DeFi and other projects will receive $FLOW token supported grants.
Another reason for the initiative is the hope to capitalize on the ever-competitive and costly Ethereum ecosystem, which developers are trying to avoid the other day. The initiative is aimed at boosting competitiveness and engagement in the Flow development. But, despite the developer-rewarding focus, according to Flow CEO Roham Gharegozlouthe, the major part of the fund's capitalization will be leveraged as investment capital, rather than grants for developers.
Once created by Dapper Labs to unload the blockchain for games, and NFT trading, the $FLOW proof-of-stake algorithm has become one of the fastest top-tier blockchains. Last fall, it was reported that Dapper Labs was "planning to integrate support for the Filecoin network into Flow to create a decentralized NFT storage."
Currently, $FLOW is gaining more rooters in the realm, and recent achievements like Instagram support for Flow NFTs or plans of Dapper Wallet to support $FLOW already this summer are the best proof of that.