Crypto Funding: Ledger and EigenLabs Lead $227 Million in Investments
Security is top of mind, as crypto funding investments continue to flow.
BillionPhotos/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
Crypto startup funding is sailing steadily this week, with 11 different companies landing an estimated $227 million in funding this week, a slight increase from the week before, during which companies secured $190 million.
Among them, cryptocurrency hardware Ledger secured the most significant amount of funding. It landed $109 million in its series C round with investors from 10T, CapHorn Invest, Morgan Creek Capital and Cathay Innovation, just to name a few.
Following this round of capital, Ledger is said to be valued at $1.4 billion.
This funding announcement comes during a time when centralized exchanges have been heavily scrutinized for security concerns, and self-custody discussions are on the rise.
A focus on trust
EigenLabs, the team behind EigenLayer, a re-staking protocol on Ethereum, has raised a significant amount of money this week, securing $50 million in a Series A round led by Blockchain Capital.
Other participants which participated in the round include Electric Capital, Polychain Capital, Hack VC, Finality Capital and Coinbase Ventures, among others.
“One of the central bottlenecks to innovation in today’s crypto ecosystem is the requirement for projects to bootstrap trust or cryptoeconomic security,” Sreeram Kannan the founder of EigenLayer said in a statement posted on Twitter.
Adding that EigenLabs was born “in the hopes of creating a new model, in which developers can easily consume trust, instead of needing to build trust, and design powerful systems of assurance that make the cryptosystem safer and more useful.”
The team behind the protocol plans to launch EigenLayer in phases over the course of this year.
Other notable funding rounds this week:
- Fetch.AI secures $40 million in an equity and token round. DWF Labs also invested in the startup. It is currently valued at $250 million.
- Econia Labs, a hyper-parallelized on-chain order book on Aptos DeFi, secured $6.5 million from Dragonfly Capital.
- Derivatives trading protocol Cega lands an additional $5 million in a seed extension round led by Dragonfly Capital.
