In brief
- Nervos has launched an incubator.
- It has put $5 million behind it.
- It will fund developments of dapps for Nervos.
The Nervos Network, an Ethereum competitor that raised $72 million in a token sale, is paying up to $100,000 per project to entice top developers into building on its platform. The money is part of a $5 million incubator, CKLabs, which launched today.
As part of the deal, Nervos, which partly operates out of China, will give successful applicants up to $100,000 in funding, mentoring, and access to a roster of wealthy and prestigious investors, among them Polychain, Blockchain Capital, and Dragonfly.
Nervos is a two-tiered Ethereum competitor network that’s secured by a Proof of Work consensus mechanism, just like Bitcoin. It runs on a souped-up version of the same unadulterated free-market capitalism that powers much of the industry.
On Nervos, users can stake the platform’s native token to receive some state storage space on its bottom layer, which Nervos claims is very secure. Should the blockchain become popular, storage space on this secure bottom will become scarce, and thus expensive.
According to the dictum of the invisible, calloused hand of the free market, those able to afford the space will be among the best users of the network. Anyone unable to afford to rent out this bottom layer will be condemned to building on the second layer of the Nervos blockchain, which is slightly less secure but more scalable.
Nervos launched its mainnet in November 2019 following a $72 million token sale. While recipients of a $30 million grant scheme build the infrastructure for the network, Nervos, through its incubator, is hoping to entice top developers into building dapps for its network.
Ben Morris, who heads Nervos’s global business development, told Decrypt that the incubator will start with two projects, for whom work could commence in as soon as three weeks, and occur over the next three or four months.
Though Nervos has not yet determined the first two projects, Morris said that decentralized finance (DeFi) is among the most popular use cases. He said that other popular use cases include decentralized gaming, storage systems and oracles.
But he’s open to anything; Nervos just wants to create applications to grow the value of the network. The point of the incubator, said Morris, is “to get these projects to a stage where they're able to successfully raise capital with investors,” he said. After the first two projects have completed, Nervos will ramp up the incubator to accept more projects.
Where some incubators invite investors at the end (like the fledgling a16z crypto school, which, while not strictly an incubator, bears all the hallmarks of one), Morris said that the Nervos incubator “will be more intimate.” Nervos will be “actively speaking and communicating with the investors and letting them know about the progress of their projects,” he said.
Applications are open on its website.