Blockchain Firm Figment Launches $16M Investment Arm to Fund Cosmos, Polkadot Projects

Canada-based blockchain infrastructure provider Figment has launched a $16 million investment fund, Figment Capital, to support decentralized protocols and applications including Cosmos, Terra and Livepeer. 

• In an announcement Tuesday, Figment said the new venture fund will be an investment arm of the Figment stack, and capital will be used to “supercharge” its support for blockchain protocols and early-stage projects.
• Figment provides infrastructure and tools for networks including Cosmos, Polkadot, Celo and Skale.
• The team is “bullish on privacy” and the fund is dedicated to supporting projects with Figment’s validator or developer infrastructure, said Clayton Menzel, head of marketing at Figment.
• The funding will be dedicated to projects building on multiple layer 1s including Cosmos, Polkadot, Ethereum, Solana, Celo, NEAR, said Menzel.
• “We are dedicated to the Cosmos ecosystem so [we’re funding] anything running on Tendermint Cosmos-SDK because we are super familiar with the ecosystem,” Menzel told CoinDesk.
• Cosmos is a decentralized network made up of independent blockchains that utilize byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanisms, including Tendermint BFT.
• So far, $1 million from the fund has been allocated to a couple of projects the team is not ready to make public yet, Menzel said. 
• Figment CEO Lorien Gabel said for three years the firm has supported numerous blockchains and onboarded thousands of developers into the Web 3 ecosystem.
• “With Figment Capital, we will now be able to fully support the launch of new Web 3 protocols and applications from testnet to mainnet and beyond as an active infrastructure provider, partner and investor.” said Gabel.

UPDATE (April 27, 13:38 UTC): Adds the funding will be dedicated to projects building on multiple layer 1s including Cosmos, Polkadot, Ethereum, Solana, Celo, NEAR.