HBAR Launches $250M Metaverse Fund To Onboard Major Brands

The HBAR Foundation said Thursday it has set aside $250 million in a new fund aimed at drawing in both consumer brands and their users to Hedera Hashgraph’s metaverse ecosystem.

HBAR, responsible for the development of Hedera’s network, said its Metaverse Fund targets both business-to-consumer and business-to-business-to-consumer applications where it expects to integrate users “at scale” into Web3 development.

The fund is focused on building out an “advanced” digital world as well as furthering an ecosystem of supporting and complementing projects, according to a statement. It is also attempting to support game developers interested in building within the ecosystem and to introduce non-fungible tokens (NFTs) into the developer’s projects.

Funding will be directed toward four main areas including gaming, sports, fashion and entertainment.

Customer relationship management platform Sayl has been earmarked for an undisclosed sum as one of the fund’s first grantees. Sayl said it wants to become a “leading gateway” to provide Web3 owner capabilities for “reputable brands.”

“We chose to build on Hedera for its carbon negative and enterprise-grade blockchain, tailored for security and regulatory compliance,” Sayl co-founder Geert Roete said. “This is exactly what brands and consumers are looking for when they enter this space.”

Following on the heels of its $155 million Crypto Economy Fund last month, HBAR said it hopes its latest fund will attract more users and brands to the network as it eyes off growth in the fast-paced sector.

“The metaverse will require robust infrastructure that champions decentralization while remaining intuitive for consumers, brands, and developers,” the fund’s director Alex Russman said.

Hashgraph is one of the few networks in the industry that utilizes a Directed Acyclic Graph structure. Unlike a blockchain, Hashgraph’s ledger records transactions via vertices stacked atop each other rather than along a data chain.

Due to a lack of block confirmation protocols, critics argue the network is susceptible to bad actors seeking to take advantage and influence certain nodes to transmit false data. Others argue the network is too centralized, though Hedera and HBAR dispute this, claiming both the consensus mechanism and its governance model are “highly decentralized.”

The foundation said the design choice increases transactional speed and efficiency as more transactions are added to the network. Hedera processes around 2.6 million transactions per day, with transaction finalization times of roughly 5 seconds.

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