Oasis Launches $160M Ecosystem Fund With Backing From Jump Capital and Others

After the establishment of a $160 million investment fund, a long-dormant layer 1 project with a focus on privacy is showing signs of life.

The Oasis Foundation announced Tuesday the launch of the fund in collaboration with a host of major venture capital firms, including Dragonfly Capital Partners, Draper Dragon Fund, Electric Capital, FBG, Jump Capital, Kenetic Capital, NGC Ventures and Pantera Capital, according to a press release.

The fund will be used to seed early stage projects building on Oasis, including “DeFi, NFTs [non-fungible tokens], metaverse, data tokenization, data DAO, data governance” and other projects.

In an interview with CoinDesk, Oasis Labs founder Dawn Song said there is already a deal-flow pipeline of young projects ready for announcement.

“The hope is that everyone works together to fuel the growth of the ecosystem,” she said.

The fund bears similarity to a program established by Avalanche last month, Blizzard, where a group of VC investors committed $200 million to early stage projects. Both programs are part of a wider trend of layer 1s committing massive sums of money to bootstrapping projects and traffic in an increasingly competitive landscape for Ethereum base layer alternatives.

Read more: Fantom Commits $314M in FTM to Boost Ecosystem Development

As it looks to enter the race, Oasis may be starting far behind the pack.

In 2018, the buzzy startup focused on privacy-preserving smart contracts raised $45 million, but aside from occasional partnerships, has remained dormant ever since.

However, Song told CoinDesk that the chain may be preparing for prime time. The chain hosts “ParaTimes” – essentially sidechains with different execution environments that collectively rely on the same consensus layer – and a forthcoming ParaTime, “Emerald,” will enable Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) projects to easily port over to the chain.

Song said that the launch of Emerald is “imminent,” that a host of recognizable DeFi names are already building implementations on the network and that the launch of Emerald may come with a ROSE token liquidity mining program as well.

“There is a DEX [decentralized exchange], there’s lending, NFT projects, including special types of NFTs, there are lots of exciting partnerships coming,” she said.