Ethereum’s new scaling solution, Layer N, has successfully secured $5 million in an initial funding round. Notably, the round was spearheaded by Founders Fund, associated with PayPal’s co-founder, Peter Thiel, and the investment group dao5.
Unveiled this Wednesday by Layer N, the fundraising event attracted attention and capital from several prominent cryptocurrency investment entities, including Kraken Ventures, Mirana Ventures, GSR, and Amber Group.
In a public statement on platform X, the Layer N team expressed their enthusiasm: “We are thrilled to share the news of our $5M seed round, with leadership from @foundersfund and @daofive, complemented by contributions from other significant funds and individual investors.”
They further emphasized that this funding event symbolizes the project’s inaugural step in “establishing Ethereum’s financial superlayer.”
‘Ethereum’s financial layer’
In a discussion on platform X, Layer N introduces itself as the “financial layer of Ethereum,” boasting reduced transaction costs and enhanced transaction processing speed.
The conversation further characterizes Layer N as the pioneering “layer 2 network on Ethereum tailored primarily for scaling DeFi.” It boldly states its ambition to compete with, if not surpass, existing conventional financial systems.
For a considerable duration, Ethereum’s primary layer has grappled with exorbitant fees and languid transaction paces. These challenges have acted as a catalyst for developers, encouraging them to construct supplementary layers over Ethereum, optimized specifically for the needs of decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.
Founders Fund’s increasing crypto focus
The Founders Fund, associated with Peter Thiel, contributed $1.8 million to Layer N’s recent funding round, as verified by the project’s team in a statement to The Block.
This investment decision followed the Founders Fund’s recruitment of Joey Krug, previously Pantera Capital’s co-chief investment officer, as a partner in April.
Peter Thiel has been a consistent advocate for Bitcoin (BTC) and the broader cryptocurrency realm. There have even been speculations suggesting that Thiel might have encountered Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s mysterious creator, in Aguilla over two decades ago.
Earlier this year, Thiel’s investment enterprise grabbed headlines. It was disclosed that the fund had garnered over $1 billion in profits by strategically divesting the lion’s share of its cryptocurrency assets just before a significant market downturn.
