Dubai Fund Sells $750 Million of Bitcoin to Buy Cardano, Polkadot

Editor's Note: This story was updated on Feb. 27 at 9:50pm EST and on March 1 at 10:44 EST.

Dubai-based crypto fund FD7 Ventures says it will sell over $750 million worth of Bitcoin in the next month to purchase Cardano and Polkadot instead, according to a press release on Thursday.

"The company has actually been in the works for over 8 months with the announcement being just made recently. Many of the [liquidity providers] in the fund are already holders of Ethereum and [Bitcoin] which have been given to us to manage," Abdul Ilyad, spokesperson for FD7 Ventures, told Decrypt.

Both blockchains are high-speed networks that can support low-cost smart contract deployment and provide scalability to new developers.

The fund claims to hold over $1 billion in net assets, with most of that in Bitcoin. However, its executives say Bitcoin has served its purpose and newer blockchains are a better bet.

“Aside from the fact that Bitcoin was first to market and society has given it meaning as a store of value, I think Bitcoin is actually pretty useless," Prakash Chand, managing director at FD7, said in the press release. He added that Ethereum, Cardano, and Polkadot would eventually be more valuable than Bitcoin “within the next few years.”

Chand, in the press release, said the two projects are the foundation of the “new internet” and Web3—a term used in recent times to describe the upcoming generation of Internet startups that conduct business in a peer-to-peer manner without relying on a middleman.

Some examples of these, FD7 said in its release, were Cardano’s efforts to create a blockchain solution that addressed the needs of unbanked individuals in Africa and Polkadot’s continual development of an ecosystem of Web3 projects.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson applauded the fund’s decision. “Welcome FD7 Ventures to the ecosystem. Let us know if you need any technical support,” he tweeted, linking to the press release.

FD7 claims to have already begun its purchases of ADA and DOT, the native tokens of Cardano and Polkadot respectively. In the last 24 hours, the price of DOT fell 9%, in line with the rest of the falling market. In contrast, Cardano is defying the market, up 4%.