Phi Labs Secures $21M Seed, Led by CoinFund and Hashed

Phi Labs, a contributor to an incentivized smart contract built on Cosmos, announced a $21 million seed round on Thursday. 

The raise, led by investment firms CoinFund and Hashed, will go towards staff expansion, product development and building on Phi Lab’s protocol Archway. The team currently has around 20 full-time employees, with the hope of hitting over 50 by year-end. 

Other participants in the round include 1confirmation, IDEO CoLab, Figment, Blockchain Capital, Wintermute, Chorus One, stake.fish, Lemniscap, Cosmostation and Hypersphere Ventures.

Archway is “one of the first smart contracting chains where any [decentralized app] developer can build on top of, and then access all the other assets throughout the Cosmos ecosystem,” Phi Labs Chief Executive Griffin Anderson told Blockworks. 

Archway, Anderson said, rewards developers via its protocol by sharing a portion of transaction fees and inflationary rewards generated on the Cosmos network. 

“[Smart contract platforms] all been kind of ideating on the trilemma around scalability, decentralization and security,” Billy Dishman, Principal at CoinFund, said. “And what is largely ignored is the idea of ideating and improving tokenomics on blockchains.”

“There are three main constituents within a blockchain. You have the validators, the users and the developers, and so far, no one [has] prioritized the developers.”
Archway is expected to launch sometime this year. The protocol’s tokens, according to Archway’s website, will not be offered in certain countries including the US, China, Zimbabwe, Albania and Venezuela.

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