The crypto protocol Gasp (formerly Mangata Finance) built on EigenLayer, has raised 5 million dollars in a private funding round.
Thanks to this fundraising, Gasp’s fully diluted token valuation is now at 80 million dollars.
Summary
Gasp: the new funds raised by the crypto project
Gasp is a crypto project born in 2020 under the name of Mangata Finance, and recently renamed.
This is an exchange protocol that supports transfers between layer-2 solutions of Ethereum such as Arbitrum and Optimism, but its ultimate goal would be to support all blockchains.
Initially the project was incubated by Polychain and used Polkadot, however in the end it was not launched on this blockchain because its development team had lost confidence in Polkadot.
They then moved on to EigenLayer, a restaking protocol for Ethereum, and in the coming weeks its development team will launch the testnet.
The EigenLayer protocol
EigenLayer is one of the first Ethereum restaking protocols.
After switching to Proof-of-Stake, restaking can be used to ensure the security of other elements of the mainnet, including other protocols. This allows stakers to earn additional rewards from restaking protocols, thus increasing their earnings.
AVS (Actively Validated Services) are systems that require their own distributed validation semantics for verification, such as sidechains, second layers, virtual machines, oracles, etc. EigenLayer is an AVS of Ethereum.
These AVS require security, and restaking avoids the need for them to rely on their own validators, instead using those of Ethereum. The latter not only effectively defend the mainnet, but also earn additional income through restaking.
In this way, restaking can be considered a sort of common or borrowed security, which however does not in any way affect the layer-1 (i.e. the Ethereum blockchain).
EigenLayer was born as Ethereum’s AVS last June, thanks to an idea by Sreeram Kannan, with the aim of reducing the costs of starting and managing the network and eliminating the complexities related to security for new projects.
The crypto fundraising for Gasp, a project developed on EigenLayer
Mangata Finance has recently changed its name to Gasp, and has migrated from Polkadot to EigenLayer.
Yesterday he announced that he raised 5 million dollars in a private funding round.
Cluster Capital, Polychain Capital, Master Ventures, Faculty Group, Moonhill, LVT Capital, CMS, Token Metrics and others participated in the fundraising campaign.
This is the third round of funding for the protocol in three years, with a total capital raised of 11 million dollars.
Gasp aims to use the funds to connect the various Ethereum rollups together, and in the future the entire multichain space, allowing for continuous, secure, and efficient capital flows between the various blockchains.
Currently it is a cross-rollup protocol that allows exchanges only between Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism and most of Ethereum’s main rollups.
According to an anonymous source, but informed about the facts, the recent 5 million round would have effectively brought the protocol to reach a valuation of 80 million dollars.
The MGX token
A few days ago Mangata Finance changed its name to Gasp, but on DEX its token MGX is still being traded, which should soon be renamed.
MGX made its debut on the crypto markets last year, at a price of about 0.4 thousandths of a dollar.
At the end of the year, thanks to the recovery of the crypto markets, its price first rose to 0.6 cents, and then suddenly shot up to 4.8 cents, which still today represents its all-time high. In other words, it made a leap of 1,100% in less than a month, only to later plummet to 1.4 cents.
Its price then dropped even further, so much so that now it is at 1.3 thousandths, but although this is a level 73% lower than the maximum recorded just over three months ago, it is still more than three times higher than the initial price seven months ago.
However, it should be noted that in the last few days it did not react well to the news regarding the project.
Despite the rebranding and the news of fundraising, it continued to decline, losing 11% in the last seven days. In total, the accumulated loss in the last 30 days is 26%.
It is possible that it is still simply dealing with the bursting of the speculative bubble at the end of 2023.
