Institutional Bulletin: Flashbots Becomes a Unicorn, EthStorage Raises $7 Million

The cryptocurrency industry is attracting an increasing number of institutional players. This is reflected in new investments in infrastructure and in the growing attention that companies are giving to Bitcoin as an asset class. The most important events of the past weeks are in ForkLog’s review.

Flashbots Becomes a Unicorn Following a $60 Million Round

Infrastructure company Flashbots raised $60 million at a $1 billion valuation. The Series B round included leading venture firms, L2-projects, business angels, developers DEX and other applications.

The Flashbots team will deploy the funds to build the SUAVE platform, which offers “faster and more confidential” blockchain transactions. The project focuses on mitigating the negative aspects of MEV, ‘the invisible tax’ in Ethereum.

EthStorage Raises $7 Million at a $100 Million Valuation

The Ethereum L2 storage startup EthStorage raised $7 million in seed funding. The round valued the company at $100 million.

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

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

The project is currently in development. EthStorage is a second-layer data storage built on top of Ethereum. Its aim is to achieve petabyte-scale capacity with a 1,000x reduction in costs.

Binance Labs Invests in Privacy-Focused Protocol zkPass

The privacy protocol zkPass raised $2.5 million in seed investments from Binance Labs, Sequoia China, OKX Ventures, dao5, Susquehanna International Group, Cypher Capital, Leland Ventures and Blockchain Founders Fund.

zkPass is built on several technological pillars:

• zero-knowledge proofs;
• confidential computing protocol;
• TLS.

The new solution allows users to disclose personal data on websites without uploading documents themselves.

zkPass can be used in privacy-focused decentralized identity systems, data marketplaces and DeFi services that rely on off-chain sources.

The project is part of the Binance Labs incubation program. The funds will go toward developing the testnet, currently in pre-alpha. 190,000 users are on the waitlist for the new solution.

Also in ForkLog:

• Journalists learned that Sequoia cut the crypto fund’s valuation by 66%.