The HBAR Foundation has launched a $50 million fintech and payments fund to encourage fintech companies to leverage Hedera’s speed, low costs, stability, and carbon-negative footprint in order to build new, essential financial products and services. CoinJournal reported this in the foundation’s press release.
Closing the Gap to Mainstream Fintech
Despite massive investments in crypto technologies during 2021—investments that KPMG reports grew from $5.4 billion in 2020 to over $30 billion—the adoption of distributed technologies remains marginal within the mainstream fintech sector.
The HBAR Foundation believes Hedera is uniquely positioned to bridge this divide. The new fund aims to unleash a wave of innovation in financial technology and accelerate Hedera’s integration into financial services infrastructure.
Integration Proposals Are Now Open
Starting today, the HBAR Foundation is inviting proposals for Hedera-focused fintech integrations and support for financial and payments applications across key use cases. Priority areas include central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), stablecoins, remittance, payments and micropayments, and asset tokenization.
Stabilizing Tokenized Assets
The foundation will direct resources to issuers, technology providers, and regulators to help shape and stabilize the emerging tokenized asset class. Funding will prioritize modular, API-first approaches, with particular support for open-source projects.
Shayne Higdon, CEO of the HBAR Foundation, commented:
Although decentralized networks clearly appeal to fintech builders, technical, cost, and structural bottlenecks still hinder innovation on today’s technologies. We believe Hedera is uniquely equipped to disrupt the global fintech industry with features such as high network speed, near-instant finality, security, and reliability. Our new Fintech and Payments Fund will make it more attractive for fintechs to explore Hedera’s advantages in areas like CBDCs, stablecoins, payments, and asset tokenization.
Low, Predictable Fees and High Transaction Throughput
The Hedera network provides low, predictable fees that suit large-scale transactions, micropayments, and digital asset minting, while also being among the most energy-efficient and carbon-negative distributed networks available.
Hedera’s Hashgraph technology is capable of handling up to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), compared with an average of roughly 1,700 TPS across traditional payment rails.
Retail customers can send cross-border remittances in seconds, and shoppers can validate coupons at point of sale almost instantly. Even with smart contracts, Hedera’s EVM performance is orders of magnitude faster than Ethereum Mainnet.
The Hedera NFT token framework is advanced enough to meet real-world financial requirements, offering features such as fractionalization, customizable fees to support royalty payments, and metadata support.