VCs back IOTA’s smart contract network Assembly with $100M injection

• Private investors led by LD Capital, HyperChain Capital and Huobi Ventures have raised $100 million to be injected into the newly launched Assembly project built within the IOTA ecosystem.
• In an interview, Dominik Schiener, co-founder and chairman of the IOTA Foundation has expressed his excitement on the launch of Assembly as well as the $100 million raised to further develop applications on the platform.

In a recent interview with Reuters, Dominik Schiener, the co-founder and chairman of the IOTA Foundation, revealed that some of the largest Asian venture capital firms and crypto hedge funds have raised $100 million to be invested in the newly launched blockchain, Assembly, built under the IOTA ecosystem. Assembly seeks to focus on decentralized finance (DeFI), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and cryptocurrency games. A new decentralized layer-1 smart contract network, the platform will further venture into the up and coming Web 3 and Metaverse space.

As CNF reported earlier, Assembly will offer developers, creators, early participants and DAOs a staggering 70 percent of the total ASMB token supply. Notably, the Assembly mainnet is set to launch in 2022 as a permissionless network governed by the IOTA community.

Read More: IOTA announces new decentralized smart contract network Assembly for Web 3 and Metaverse

Par the interview, it is clear that institutions are buying into the Assembly vision. Schiener revealed that the platform has received major attention from Asia with some of the largest Asian VCs led by LD Capital, HyperChain Capital, Signum Capital and Huobi Ventures injecting $100 million into the platform.

The project previously raised $18 million in seed round funding from established crypto funds and private individuals with this amount focused on fostering technological development. The $100 million will support builders and teams eager to capitalize on the opportunities offered by Assembly with project teams invited to apply for grants.

Speaking about the recent injection, billionaire investor Stelian Balta, founder of HyperChain Capital, stated:

We always needed a feeless, highly scalable network for developers to build highly scalable apps in the crypto ecosystem. Assembly does that. They have been pioneers in the crypto ecosystem since 2015, and we are confident in their experience and their vision for the next decade.

Rae Deng, Partner at Signum Capital spoke highly of IOTA  and the team behind it. He explained that the team “foresaw the many problems plaguing our industry today, such as scalability and transaction cost. IOTA’s ledger structure has always been the answer to those problems and that answer is now revealed by Assembly…”

Schiener has previously noted that he does not view Assembly as an Ethereum killer but rather a platform that can co-exist with it. In fact, developers who favour Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for smart contracts can enjoy full compatibility with the Assembly infrastructure. Speaking to the uniqueness of Assembly, Schiener stated;

Each smart contract chain can be fully customized to the project’s needs. In addition, Assembly is already fully EVM-compatible, and has support for WASM [WebAssembly], plus Go, Rust and TypeScript as optional smart contract languages.

Through Assembly, developers will be allowed to build on top of the blockchain. Connected to the IOTA ecosystem, this new blockchain will enjoy all the features offered by IOTA including security and scalability.