The cryptocurrency industry is drawing more and more institutional players. This is reflected in both new investments in infrastructure and the growing attention companies are paying to Bitcoin as an asset class. The most significant developments of the past weeks are in ForkLog’s roundup.
Celestia project raises $55 million for the launch of “modular blockchains”
The Celestia Foundation raised $55 million in a round led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital.
Participants include Placeholder, Galaxy, Delphi Digital, Blockchain Capital, NFX, Protocol Labs, Figment, Maven 11, Spartan Group, FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto and several angel investors, including Balaji Srinivasan and Eric Wall.
Celestia provides clients with a modular architecture for deploying and scaling “modular blockchains.” The latter, according to the project’s founder Mustafa Al-Bassam, will be “defining in the next decade Web3 innovations.”
Celestia backs 26 projects under the Modular Fellows program, which provides mentorship. The solutions being built cover various facets of the crypto industry, including Rollups-based technologies and DeFi applications.
Gaming blockchain platform Stardust raises $30 million
The blockchain game development tools provider Stardust raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Framework Ventures with participation from Acrew Capital, Blockchain Capital and Distributed Global.
The company was founded in 2018 by current CEO Kaanan Lindner. The idea for the startup was suggested to him by the NFT-game CryptoKitties. According to Lindner, even with his experience as a programmer and developer, the project’s user interface proved to be “very challenging.”
Stardust aims to ease the development of accessible virtual blockchain-based games on networks like Solana and Polygon, using cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
The company employs 40 people. It charges game developers a monthly subscription per gamer and a fee for network transactions.
ChainSafe raises $18.8 million for multi-chain solutions
Infrastructure firm ChainSafe raised $18.8 million in a Series A round led by Canadian venture firm Round13.
Among other investors: ConsenSys, HashKey Capital, NGC Ventures and Digital Finance. The raised funds will be directed toward further development of the platform.
ChainSafe was founded in 2017. The company employs 120 people from 33 countries. Initially Ethereum-focused, the firm has shifted to a multi-chain approach, focusing on building developer tools.
One of ChainSafe’s projects is Web3.unity. It is an SDK for connecting Unity-based games to blockchain solutions and cross-chain bridges. Another product is the Ethereum client Lodestar.
Shardeum founder of Indian exchange WazirX project raises $18.2 million
The sharding-focused blockchain startup Shardeum raised $18.2 million in seed investments at a valuation of $199 million.
More than 50 investors participated in the round, including Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, Jane Street and Foresight Ventures. Shardeum is led by the founder of Indian exchange WazirX, Nischal Shetty, and blockchain architect Omar Saeed. The developers are building a blockchain platform based on Proof-of-Stake, using dynamic sharding technology.
The funds raised in the private token sale will be used to scale up marketing efforts, expand the development team and hold hackathons in India and the U.S. to create incentives for ecosystem growth.
Mainnet launch of Shardeum is scheduled for Q1 2023. A public token sale is planned later.
Uber’s blockchain rival raises $9 million to decentralize ride-hailing
Decentralized Engineering Corporation (DEC) raised $9 million in a seed round of financing.
It was led by venture firms Foundation Capital and Road Capital with participation from 6th Man Ventures, Common Metal and angels including former Uber managers Josh Morer and Ryan McKillen.
The startup developed the TRIP protocol on the Solana blockchain. Its first application on it was Teleport for decentralizing ride-hailing.
TRIP is open-source. Key components such as dispatch, payments, data verification, and dispute resolution will be available to all network participants.
The raised funds will allow DEC to expand testing, establish new partnerships, and foster ecosystem development through hackathons.
In 2023 the startup aims to launch Teleport in one of the cities. The project also seeks to achieve real decentralization, with protocol governance shifting from the team to several distributed entities.
Tapio protocol on Polkadot raises $4 million in seed funding
Tapio Protocol on the Polkadot base raised $4 million in a seed round led by Polychain Capital, Hypersphere and Arrington Capital.
It also included participation from Spartan, LongHash, 0xVentures, CMS, D1 Ventures, 11-11 DG Partners, Genlock, Valhalla, PAKA and Double Peak.
The developers are building a platform of synthetic assets aimed at boosting the efficiency of staking and trading derivatives.
Representatives of Tapio Protocol believe that liquidity fragmentation is characteristic of Polkadot-based derivatives. They say the raised funds will be used to address this problem.
Also on ForkLog:
- Blockchain developer BoostyLabs and the Hypra Foundation have launched a venture studio for Web3 startups.
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