EigenLayer’s $100M haul ignites series of adjacent investments

The company behind Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer announced a $100 million investment this week from the coveted venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. The raise puts EigenLayer in a small group to clear nine figures in a venture round over the past several months, joining the likes of Hong Kong exchange HashKey and interoperability platform Wormhole. 

EigenLayer allows ether that has been staked to secure the Ethereum blockchain to be “restaked,” or used to secure other chains and services. A16z general partner Ali Yahya said this vision to add revenue streams to Ethereum’s consensus mechanism has the “potential to change everything.”

Read more: A16z injects $100M into EigenLayer

Interestingly, the protocols hoping to help build the network of other chains and services secured with EigenLayer have drawn funding interest too.

AltLayer, for instance, announced a $14.4 million funding round this week co-led by Polychain and Hack VC. AltLayer creates restaked rollups which apply EigenLayer’s mechanism to the layer-2s used to batch transactions on top of the Ethereum blockchain. 

AltLayer has also helped EigenLayer offer its EigenDA data availability service to Arbitrum. 

Also this week, Binance Labs made an investment in Renzo, which aims to become a hub for EigenLayer security and risk management. It also offers a liquid restaking token — kind of like Lido’s stETH but for EigenLayer. 

Reboot World, Polymer Labs, and Puffer are other examples of EigenLayer-adjacent projects to secure funding in the past few weeks, as EigenLayer’s rising tide appears to be lifting several boats. 

Helius raises $9.5 million for Solana developer platform

Solana developer platform Helius announced a $9.5 million Series A led by Foundation Capital this week. 

The startup aims to make things like RPC node costs, data streaming and on-chain indexing easier for developers, according to a press release. Last week, Blockworks reported that the job market has been heating up for developers literate in Solana, which uses a different coding language than Ethereum.

Read more: Crypto Hiring Q&A: Crypto firms are looking for Solana-literate devs

Helius will use the funding to hire low-level systems and backend engineers, the release said, adding that it will also spend the new capital to enhance its technical stack. 

“[It] was (and still is) too hard to build fast, cheap and scalable apps as a crypto developer…Solana was the first real answer to this with its scale and performance, but it was hard to build on while everyone ruled it out due to vast information asymmetry — we doubled down on it, exclusively,” Helius co-founder Mert Mumtaz wrote on X. 

Other notable fundraises

• Gambling platform Monkey Tilt raised $21 million from investors including Polychain and Hack VC.
• Hack VC announced it had raised a $150 million fund for crypto startups.
• Meso Network announced a $9.5 million seed round to grow its platform making money transfers between banks and crypto wallets easier.

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