Web3 has evolved through clear trends, from DeFi summer and NFTs to memecoin launchpads, where the success of a protocol launch has often been tied to timing a trend. However, venture investors agree that a protocol’s long-term success often hinges on the quality of its founding team—their resilience, creativity, and intellectual horsepower.
At the same time, much of venture funding has flowed into «infrastructure» investments, under the assumption that financial value would accumulate there. This has resulted in a lack of practical utility for retail users, and the industry often suffers from an overemphasis on speculation. What Web3 and blockchain really need are more consumer-focused applications that create meaningful use cases for everyday users.
Building Consumer-Focused Utility as an Industry
Areas like on-chain real estate, tokenized treasuries, undercollateralized lending, socialized finance, structured products, and diverse yield options continue to offer new opportunities for utility. The challenges faced by application builders and the industry’s need for better use cases, led to creating an investment arm dedicated to finding the next generation of consumer-oriented innovators.
Matrix Foundation, the entity behind the CosmWasm and upcoming EVM smart contract platform Nibiru Chain launched its strategic investment arm, Nibiru Ventures.
The venture aims to offer strategic guidance, funding, and other resources to emerging blockchain projects within and beyond the Nibiru ecosystem. Nibiru Ventures is dedicated to supporting the next generation of Web3 developers and project founders by helping them position themselves against established players, explore untapped areas of development, and build enduring go-to-market strategies to bring a collaborative vision to life.
The challenges faced by Web3 founders are not always unique to the industry. Like any startup, they require access to capital, a better understanding of how to secure it, product viability discussions, and guidance on building out operational areas such as entity formation, payments, legal matters, hiring, and team development.
With the support of Nibiru Chain, founders also gain access to specialized resources in marketing, design, venture strategy, and development. These resources are available to applications seeking to expand from their current chain to Nibiru or those aiming to launch Nibiru-native projects.
Aligning Incentives with Builders
The issuing of «grants» has emerged as a common practice in the realm of ecosystem building. Flush with venture funding, blockchain ecosystems often offer what amounts to «free money» for development teams to build specific applications. This approach mirrors the bounty system seen in hackathons.
Consequently, there’s been a surge in development teams rushing to create minimum viable products (MVPs) in response to protocol request-for-proposals (RFPs) from blockchain ecosystems. This trend has created a short-term mindset focused on «hackathon» or «grant» farming.
There are even said to be multiple developer shops within countries such as Vietnam that are focused primarily on building MVPs for ecosystem bounties and grants without the actual desire to continue running the product after achieving their winnings. Ultimately, this is detrimental to the industry as well.
The idea behind a strategic investment from Nibiru Ventures is to cover initial integration costs, including developer time and salaries. However, for long-term viability, an application should seek sufficient venture funding to reach break-even profitability, whether at mainnet launch or after gaining traction post-launch.
There’s a clear distinction between ecosystem farmers and those dedicated to building meaningful utility for end users. Nibiru Ventures will focus on cutting through the noise to identify the key players to partner and back.
Jonathan Chang, COO of Nibiru Chain, said, “Nibiru Ventures was created to overcome the unique challenges faced by ecosystem dApp founders focused on creating value for the everyday user. It involves builders focused on helping other builders. While ancillary, the Ventures arm would expand the scope of the services that Nibiru provides, offering upfront funding and broad support to accelerate the journey of selected strategic partners”.
Envisioning Nibiru Ventures as a Strategic Partner
Nibiru Ventures aims to alleviate the upfront risks and financial burdens faced by strategic partners when integrating their applications into a new blockchain. What sets Nibiru Ventures apart from other strategic ecosystem funds is its lack of chain exclusivity, allowing builders to develop applications both within and outside of Nibiru.
The future of blockchain is modular, and it’s unlikely that a single chain will dominate. Despite this, many ecosystems still push for exclusivity in an effort to boost their own perceived value. Similar to the early years of gaming consoles like PS3 and Xbox, which enforced exclusive games, it is the truly cross-platform games that have reached a wider audience and built stronger brand visibility over time.
Rather than over-indexing on esoteric protocols, Nibiru Ventures supports consumer-facing applications that offer tangible utility with real-world use cases. These applications lead to wider adoption rates among general users and cultivate greater engagement from the average person.
Nibiru Ventures will primarily focus on decentralized exchanges, lending platforms, derivatives, vaults for structured products, and marketplaces that drive high user engagement. These areas have either already achieved product-market fit or are on the verge of becoming relevant, offering a shorter time-to-market for building and integration.
Unique Divine, co-founder of Nibiru explained, “For Nibiru Ventures, these sectors are considered particularly promising due to their alignment with patterns of historical adoption, parallels to successes in Web2, and a solid base of existing technology to build upon.”
The General Partners for Nibiru Ventures will be Unique Divine, Kevin Yang, and Jonathan Chang, who bring a wealth of experience from the likes of IBM, Google, and J.P. Morgan.
A Nibiru Ventures Success: Case-in-Point
Nibiru Ventures may be new, but it has already made notable investments in successful Web3 projects. For example, it invested in LayerBank, a decentralized multi-chain lending platform with more than $675 million in total value locked (TVL).
LayerBank shows significant growth potential and is set to become a liquidity hub across all EVM-compatible Layer 2 and rollup chains. The protocol will introduce cross-chain lending options in Q4 2024 to consolidate fragmented liquidity across Layer 2s into a unified liquidity pool.
Beginning the Journey toward Building Innovative Products With Nibiru Ventures
Nibiru Ventures is proud to offer promising projects the tools and expertise they need to deliver on their potential, including the 0-to-1 accelerator program, which provides comprehensive training and guidance across legal structuring, strategic analysis, tokenomics, and beyond to empower founders with the necessary expertise to succeed.
Any Web3 protocol project can apply to Nibiru Ventures through a simple application form for funding and join a curated portfolio of startup founders and Web3 teams driving growth and taking their projects forward with robust assistance from Nibiru.