Binance’s ambitious Industry Recovery Initiative (IRI) intended to boost the crypto industry following the FTX collapse may have fallen short of its objectives, as a recent report indicates.
The IRI was launched in November 2022, with Binance committing $1 billion in its BUSD stablecoins.
However, by October 10, only $15 million had been spent, with the remaining $985 million being moved back to Binance’s corporate treasury.
Later, in March, Binance converted these funds into cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, attributing the decision to increasing regulatory concerns over stablecoins.
Besides Binance’s commitment, 18 other organizations, including Animoca Brands, Aptos Labs, Jump Crypto, and Polygon Ventures, added to the IRI, raising a collective $100 million by February 2023.
Although Binance stated that the IRI funded 14 projects within three months of its establishment, the details of these projects remain undisclosed.
The only publicized investment from Binance’s commitment was its purchase of the South Korean crypto exchange, Gopax.
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However, based on Bloomberg’s research on wallet data, the total investment by the IRI since its inception is less than $30 million.
Notably, of the nine identifiable participants, only DWF Labs and Binance-backed Aptos utilized a portion of the funds they committed.
The current operational status of the IRI remains ambiguous, despite its online application form still being active on Google Docs. Binance has not provided a comment on the matter.
This discrepancy between the IRI’s proposed investments and actual contributions comes at a critical time.
The crypto sector is experiencing a significant decline in venture funding, dropping by as much as 70% from Q3 2022, as noted by the blockchain analytics firm, Messari.
In Q3 2023, funding volumes were a mere $2 billion, a drastic decrease from the $17 billion peak in Q1 2021.
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