NEW YORK: Some of the largest Asian venture capital firms and crypto hedge funds will invest $100 million to further develop applications on a new blockchain called Assembly under the IOTA network, co-founder Dominik Schiener told Reuters in an interview.

IOTA is a distributed ledger network similar to blockchain.

Assembly will focus on decentralized finance (DeFI), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and cryptocurrency games, Schiener said.

DeFi projects, facilitating crypto-denominated lending outside traditional banking, and NFTs, which are digital assets certified to be unique and not interchangeable are two of the fastest-growing crypto sectors. Many blockchain companies around the world have pivoted to cater to this space to meet increasing demand.