Cardano’s Cfund First Capital Goes to Israeli Fintech Startup Coti

This latest move to broaden cooperation between Cardano and Coti builds upon previous collaborations as the former seeks to upgrade its payment solution on top of the former’s expanding financial infrastructure.

Strategic Investment Marks First Allocation for New Ecosystem Venture Fund

One of the earliest proposed use cases for blockchain was the democratization of financial services, namely by reaching unbanked and underbanked communities worldwide.

From remittance payments, access to credit facilities, or even just digital wallet solutions, advancements across the blockchain landscape have finally made this vision a reality. Among them, Coti is developing the enterprise-grade base layer for the rest to build atop of.

Coti, which is short for “currency of the internet,” operates a fintech platform that supports stakeholder-driven payment solutions and empowers these stakeholders to digitize any currency. This aim aligns with Cardano’s ambitions of affordably and instantaneously transferring value between parties, and the highly scalable throughput available from Coti’s platform provides an exceptional foundation.

To help the Cardano network upgrade its payment solution for the forthcoming Shelley mainnet launch, Cfund, the Cardano ecosystem venture fund, has made a strategic investment in Coti. Although the investment terms were not disclosed, this is the first-ever allocation from the fund, which Wave Financial and Iohk oversee. Cfund endeavors to identify projects that work harmoniously with Iohk’s blockchain platforms, among them Cardano.

Fortifying Old and New Initiatives Alike

For Cardano, the value in embracing Coti’s solution lies in the opportunity to transparently and flexibly promote its native ADA token as a rapid payment method. The two organizations have already successfully partnered, resulting in the Ada Pay solution’s launch in 2019.

The solution allows merchants to accept ADA as payment and instantly convert the proceeds into 35 supported fiat currencies to avoid any corresponding volatility. Moreover, brick-and-mortar stores can adopt the solution thanks to the point of sale QR code scanner, making it straightforward to transact in ADA.

Thanks to Coti’s infrastructure, which already supports 100,000 transactions per second, making it highly scalable but simultaneously cheap to transact and secure, Ada Pay has already been touted for its high degree of integrability.

The latest tie-up represents another step toward strengthening Cardano’s payments infrastructure for expanded use in financial transactions. With Cardano’s native ADA cryptocurrency already popular, ranking as the sixth-largest token by market capitalization at the time of writing, greater transactional acceptance could expand the value of this network even further.

Though the collaboration will initially focus on upgrading Ada Pay, the organizations plan to expand their cooperation in other areas, with fresh product and service developments expected in the second half of 2021.