Bitget Partners with Core DAO to Launch $200M Ecosystem Fund After $10M Dragonfly-Backed Fundraise

Bitget, a Seychelles-based crypto exchange has entered into a partnership with Core DAO, an organization dedicated to developing the Satoshi Plus ecosystem. This collaboration will entail a $200 million ecosystem fund focusing on the support of decentralized applications (DApps) built on the Core Network Layer-1 blockchain. The Ecosystem Fund, which is backed by strategic partners including Bitget and MEXC, will provide support to early-stage projects for research and development, recruiting, marketing, community-building programs, and other priority growth initiatives.

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Apart from the $200 million investment, the partnership also entails the potential listing of Core projects and the opening of a new Core Trading Zone on Bitget and its integrated BitKeep wallet. Bitget intends to become one of the validators of the Core network and support Core staking on the exchange.

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“This investment is another show of proof of our commitment to supporting blockchain space from various angles. We have to keep in mind that the purpose of blockchain is to link the real world with Web3 space, and that is exactly what we are promoting with this partnership and our support to the ecological fund. With our help, we are confident that Core can reach great heights and advance the real principles of decentralization, which stand on transparency and the improvement of community members’ cross-chain experience,” as Gracy Chen, the Managing Director of Bitget, commented on the announcement of the collaboration.

Core DAO’s Ecosystem Fund will not utilize a grant-based system in which a project’s main criterion to receive financial support is a commitment to build on a given protocol. Instead, Core’s Ecosystem Fund will reward each project for hitting customized and agreed-upon benchmarks that deliver tangible value to the Core community. “Too often, grants programs seem designed to grab headlines and generate short-term momentum rather than incubating projects aligned with the ecosystem’s long-term success,” said Rich Rines, Initial Contributor at Core DAO. “Core DAO has always prioritized creating the highest quality technology versus being the ‘first’ or the ‘fastest’ to do something. That’s why our Ecosystem Fund with Bitget will incentivize projects for their ability to both deliver value and sustain success.”

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This announcement comes on the heels of the recent $10 million strategic investment in Bitget by Dragonfly Capital, a San Francisco-based crypto venture firm. 

This investment comes at a time when Bitget has acquired the crypto wallet BitKeep and invested an additional $30 million in the startup. The exchange, established in 2018, serves customers in Asia, Latin America, and Europe and was ranked as a top three derivatives exchange last July in a Boston Consulting Group report. Bitget intends to expand its product set, focusing on its ‘Go Beyond Derivatives’ strategy, which includes collaboration with various real-world and Web3 projects. CoinGecko currently places Bitget fifth among derivative exchanges ranked by open interest and trade volume, with 24-hour open interest of about $2.4 billion.

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert. 
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard