Avail Blockchain has secured a new Series A funding of 43 million dollars, led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and others. The Polygon project, which is building a modular infrastructure, has raised a total of 75 million dollars.
Summary
Avail Blockchain and the Series A funding co-led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund
Avail, the modular infrastructure blockchain project, has announced that it has secured a new Series A funding of 43 million dollars, bringing the total to 75 million dollars.
“We are excited to announce that we have secured a total funding of 75 million dollars. Led by @foundersfund, @dragonfly_xyze @cyberfund_we have closed pre-seed, seed, and series A rounds of 5 million dollars, 27 million dollars, and 43 million dollars respectively. With this, we look forward to accelerating our vision of building the Unification Layer. The unification layer consists of: 1. Avail DA – The base data availability layer that provides a foundational infrastructure allowing blockchain networks built on top of it to scale efficiently. 2. Avail Nexus – A proof aggregator and a rollup ZK selection sequencer on top of Avail DA, enabling cross-rollup and cross-ecosystem settlement. 3. Avail Fusion – A crypto-economic security layer guaranteed by multiple assets such as BTC and ETH.”
In practice, co-leading the funding were Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, the Venture Capital of Dragonfly and Cyber Fund.
Specifically, the Series A funding of 43 million dollars adds to the 27 million dollars of seed funding and the 5 million dollars of pre-seed funding. This means that Avail has managed to obtain a total funding of 75 million dollars.
The modular blockchain project of Avail was born last year from Polygon. Its goal is to build an “infrastructure centered on rollup”.
Among the other investors are also SevenX Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Chapter One, Foresight Ventures, Mirana Ventures, KR1, Alliance, and Hashkey Capital.
Avail Blockchain and the total funding of 75 million dollars
In general, many investors, including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Dragonfly, have repeatedly funded Avail, increasing their investments in the project. These latest 43 million dollars come in view of the launch of the mainnet.
In fact, on the blog post, Avail writes that its product Avail DA (data availability layer) is ready for launch in the coming weeks, showing impressive performance in its recent incentivized testnet.
“Avail DA has processed over 118 million transactions and has facilitated the sending of over 140 GB of data, a figure very close to the total data sent by all L2s in 2023.”
Specifically, Avail DA would be the level of availability of basic data that provides a basic infrastructure that allows blockchain networks built on top of it to scale efficiently. Its purpose is to help rollup like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Starknet to scale further and reduce transaction costs.
Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avail, commented as follows:
“We need a way to ensure that rollups scale and merge in a non-consensual manner, so that transactions between rollups can connect seamlessly.”
Besides Avail DA, there are also two other products in the Avail project. The first is Avail Nexus, a permissionless framework that connects multiple rollups or blockchains for better interoperability.
The other is Avail Fusion Security, which will allow Avail to leverage existing mature assets such as BTC and ETH to enhance its security, in addition to the native token AVAIL, through a process similar to restaking.
Founders Fund di Peter Thiel: l’investimento in Bitcoin e Ethereum per 200 milioni di dollari
In mid-February 2024, it emerged that Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, former CEO of PayPal, had invested a whopping 200 million dollars in Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2023.
The randomness is that such an investment would have occurred between the summer and autumn of 2023, just before the last bull run of cryptocurrency prices in 2024.
Specifically, Peter Thiel’s fund would have purchased 100 million dollars in Bitcoin (BTC) and 100 million dollars in Ethereum (ETH).
