EthStorage, an upcoming Ethereum scaling firm, received $7 million in investment, increasing its market valuation by $100 million during its seed fundraising round. The investment round was led by the crypto investment fund Dao5, according to the official tweet. SevenX Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Sky9 Capital, Gate Ventures, and Galxe were some of the additional investors.
The funding round, explained Kevin Yang, managing partner at Gate Ventures, was set up as a simple agreement for future tokens [SAFT].
Founded in 2022 by Qi Zhou, EthStorage is a storage roll-up built on top of Ethereum. It offers a programmable dynamic key-value store based on Ethereum’s data availability, particularly EIP-4844, and Danksharding. The firm targets petabytes of capacity at 1/1000th of the storage cost.
Additionally, the storage Layer 2 network is fully permissionless, allowing anyone with a minimum storage requirement [about 4TB] to run as a storage provider. EthStorage is fully integrated with EVM and is compatible with Ethereum development stacks, including Solidity, Remix, Hardhat, MetaMask, etc.
In May, EthStorage emerged as the winner in the evaluation of the EDCON 2023 Super Demo, which took place in Montenegro. EDCON is known for being one of the largest gatherings of the Ethereum and blockchain communities. Apart from that, the start-up received two grants from the Ethereum Foundation and an invitation to speak at EthCC Paris 2023 in August.
Ethereum: Flashbots Amass $60M Investment
The fact that EthStorage’s seed round occurs at a time when venture capital investment in the cryptocurrency industry is declining makes it noteworthy. According to a Crunchbase report, the amount of funds for the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same quarter last year fell by 82%, from $9.1 billion to $1.7 billion.
Despite the dip, VC funding is still pouring in. Just the other day, Flashbots secured $60 million from San Francisco-based Paradigm to fund its creation of a new version of transaction packaging software for the Ethereum network.
Flashbots, a Cayman Islands-based software provider that integrates Ethereum blockchain transactions, secured funding via a “decentralization beauty contest.” Here, investors are chosen through reverse pitches. A Flashbots spokesman acknowledged that the fundraising resulted in a valuation of at least $1 billion.