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The DeFi industry in China and Southeast Asia is about to get a major liquidity injection, thanks to the latest fund started by one of China’s largest banks. According to the latest reports, CMB International, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the China Merchants Bank, has launched a fund focused solely on decentralized finance protocols and non-fungible token (NFT) platforms. The fund was launched in partnership with the Nervos Foundation, the owner and operator of Nervos blockchain, a Chinese public distributed ledger system.
Called InNervation, the new fund will be focused on investing in early and growth-stage startups that create consumer-focused products. This means that companies building decentralized finance apps (DApps), DeFi protocols, proprietary blockchain platforms, and NFT marketplaces will all be eligible for investments from the fund. Startups will be able to receive between $200,000 and $2 million from the fund, either for building on the Nervos blockchain or for integrating Nervos into their products.
Startups that get selected by the fund will get access to Nervos’ suite of Layer 2 tools, which include a decentralized exchange. With an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible layer and a cross-chain bridge for Bitcoin, Tron, EOS, and Polkadot expected to roll out later this year, the suite will get even bigger in the future.
The goal of the fund is to grow and expand the Nervos ecosystem, adding projects and protocols to it that will increase the use cases for the technologies being developed by the company. Partnering with CMB International has been a logical step for Nervos, the company said in a release, as the bank’s subsidiary has been actively exploring the use of decentralized applications (DApps) since at least 2019. Kevin Wang, the co-founder of Nervos, said with Nervos’ infrastructure and CMB International’s financial support, the InNervation fund will ignite a new phase of blockchain development.
“Our team has been working diligently to ensure developers and teams have access to a variety of tools so they can create, customize, and connect their dApps, protocols, and more across multiple chains. With CMBI’s support, InNervation will be the catalyst for a new phase of development not just on Nervos but in the greater blockchain and crypto ecosystem,” he said in the company’s release.
The news about one of China’s largest banks launching a designated DeFi fund has come as a relief for companies operating in the country. With rumors about further restrictions on token trading and crypto payments being planned this year, companies both large and small have been revisiting their business model in China. However, CMB International’s fund shows that the crypto industry in the country is still going strong and is set to see further development in the future.
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