The HBAR Foundation launched a $50million fintech and payments fund in order to encourage fintech businesses to use Hedera’s speed and stability to create new financial products. CoinJournal was informed of this via a press release.

Resolving the gap in mainstream fintech

Despite huge investment in crypto technologies throughout 2021,, up more than fivefold (from $5.4 billion in 2020 and over $30 milliards according to KPMG), decentralized technology is still a marginal use case within the mainstream fintech sector.

The HBAR Foundation believes that Hedera is uniquely positioned to close this gap. This new fund will unleash a new wave in financial technology innovation and increase Hedera’s integration with the financial services infrastructure.

Allowed Integrations Now

The HBAR Foundation is looking for proposals for Hedera-focused fintech and financial integrations, as well as supporting finance and payment apps for key use cases. Priorities include CBDCs and stablecoins as well as remittance, micropayment and remittance services, asset tokenization, and payment and micropayments.

Stabilizing tokenized assets

The Foundation will focus its resources on technology providers, regulators and issuers in order to shape and stabilize the new tokenized asset class. Modular, API-first approaches will receive funding priority, especially when it comes open-source projects.

Shayne Hickdon, Chief Executive Officer of the HBAR Foundation stated:

Despite the obvious benefits of decentralized networks to fintech builders, technical and cost-related blockages still stand in the way innovation with today’s crop of technologies. Hedera’s unique features include high network speed and near-instant finality as well as security and reliability. Fintechs will find it easier to discover Hedera’s benefits, including stablecoins and payments, as well as CBDCs and asset tokenization, through our Fintech and Payments Fund.

Low, predictable fees and high transactions rate

The Hedera network has low, predictable fees that can be used for large volume transactions, micropayments and the minting of digital assets. It is also one of the most efficient, carbon-negative, decentralized networks.

The Hedera Hashgraph tech can process 10k transaction per second, while traditional payment rails process an average of 1 ,700 PPS.

A retail customer can send money internationally in seconds. Or a retail shopper may use a coupon to validate while shopping in-store. Hedera’s EVM can be used even when smart contracts are used. It is many orders of magnitude faster that the Ethereum Mainnet.

The Hedera NFT token platform is sophisticated enough to meet “real-world finance”, with features like fractionality, custom fees for support royalties payments and metadata support.