EthStorage raises $7 million in seed funding at a $100 million valuation

The Ethereum Layer-2 storage startup EthStorage, focused on scalability, has raised $7 million in seed funding. The round valued the company at $100 million.

The funding round was led by the crypto-focused venture fund dao5 with participation from SevenX Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Sky9 Capital, Gate Ventures and Galxe. The investments were structured as a simple agreement for future tokens.

EthStorage was founded in 2022 by Qi Zhou, who is also the founder of the infrastructure blockchain startup QuarkChain.

The project is currently under development. EthStorage is a layer-2 data store built on top of Ethereum. Its goal is to achieve petabyte-scale capacity with a thousandfold cost reduction.

“By periodically posting proofs of storage from EthStorage to the mainnet, the platform aims to capitalize on Ethereum’s security features, significantly increasing storage capacity at substantially reduced costs,” according to a press release by Gate Ventures.

According to the fund’s representatives, the project offers capabilities not currently available from peers such as Arweave and Filecoin.

In July, the infrastructure company Flashbots raised $60 million at a $1 billion valuation. The firm plans to use the funds to build the SUAVE platform, offering “faster and more confidential” blockchain transactions.

Earlier, developers of the EVM-compatible network Manta Network closed a funding round of $25 million to launch applications built on zero-knowledge proofs.