HBAR launches $50M fintech fund

The HBAR Foundation has launched a $50 million fintech and payments fund to encourage fintech companies to leverage Hedera’s speed, cost, stability, and carbon-negative footprint to create essential new financial products and services, CoinJournal learned from a press release. 

Addressing the gap in mainstream fintech 

Despite massive investment inflows into crypto technologies throughout 2021, up more than fivefold from $5.4 billion in 2020 to over $30 billion according to KPMG, decentralized technology remains a marginal use case in the mainstream fintech sector. 

The HBAR Foundation believes Hedera is uniquely placed to address this gap. The new fund aims to unleash a new wave of financial technology innovation and boost Hedera’s integration into the financial services infrastructure. 

Proposals for integrations now accepted

Starting today, the HBAR Foundation is seeking proposals for Hedera-focused fintech integrations and supporting finance and payment applications for key use cases. Priority areas include CBDCs, stablecoins, remittance, payment and micropayment services and asset tokenization. 

Stabilizing tokenized assets

The Foundation will target its resources at issuers, technology providers and regulators to help shape and stabilize the emerging tokenized assets class. Funding priority will be given to modular, API-first approaches, particularly when it comes to open-source projects. 

Shayne Higdon, Chief Executive Officer at the HBAR Foundation, said: 

Despite the obvious attractions of decentralized networks for fintech builders, technical, cost, and structural blockages are still getting in the way of innovation with today’s crop of technologies. We believe Hedera is uniquely positioned to disrupt the global fintech space with features like high network speed, near-instant finality, security, and reliability. Our new Fintech and Payments Fund makes it even more attractive for fintechs to explore Hedera’s benefits in areas like CBDCs, stablecoins, payments, and asset tokenization.

Low, predictable fees and high transaction rate 

The Hedera network offers low, predictable fees suitable for high volume transactions, micropayments, and minting digital assets, whilst also being one of the highest performing, carbon-negative decentralized networks.

The Hedera Hashgraph technology can process 10k transactions per second whereas traditional payment rails, on average, process 1,700 TPS. 

A retail customer can make an international remittance in seconds, or a retail shopper can validate a coupon while paying for an item in-store. Even when using smart contracts, Hedera’s EVM is several orders of magnitude faster than the Ethereum Mainnet.

The Hedera NFT token framework is advanced enough to cover “real-world finance” needs, with features such as fractionality, custom fees to support royalty payments, and metadata support.