Proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain Kadena has launched a $100 million grant program to encourage Web3 development on its platform, potentially opening the door to more use cases for the layer-1 protocol.

The grant program is an extension of Kadena Eco, an initiative designed to grow the Kadena ecosystem through the development of gaming, metaverse, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi) and Web3 projects.

Stuart Popejoy, Kadena’s founder and CEO, said his firm will be deploying “treasury resources” to strengthen the long-term sustainability of the protocol.

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Web3, which has become a sort of catch-all phrase for the next iteration of the blockchain-powered internethas received considerable attention from venture capitalists. Cointelegraph recently reported on the launch of two Web3 developer funds from crypto exchanges KuCoin and CoinDCX valued at $100 million and $135 million, respectively.

Meanwhile, decentralized node providers are stepping up to provide the infrastructure needed to advance Web3 functionalities. However, the competition is steep as legacy Web2 providers, including Amazon Web Services, Azure and Infura, have emerged as the early infrastructure players in the Web3 economy.

Related: Kadena price soars by 40% after new protocol launches and a major exchange listing

To support Web3 development on its platform, Kadena offers scalable architecture and smart contracts backed by a PoW consensus mechanism called Chainweb. Theoretically, Chainweb supports high transaction throughput without having to deploy layer-2 scaling solutions.

Kadena’s native cryptocurrency, KDA, is ranked in the top 100 on CoinMarketCap with a total capitalization of roughly $925 million at the time of writing. KDA rallied sharply earlier this month following the launch of a new interoperability protocol and a Binance listing.