Funding Wrap: Investors place more EigenLayer bets

Two more restaking-related protocols announced funding rounds this week, as venture investors look to gain exposure to EigenLayer’s burgeoning ecosystem.

Aligned Layer announced a $20 million Series A led by Hack VC. The round also drew participation from a spate of smaller crypto-focused venture firms.

Aligned Layer plans to launch as an actively validated service (AVS) on EigenLayer. AVSs are products secured via EigenLayer’s restaking, which is a means of putting staked ether to use outside of securing Ethereum, drawing an extra layer of usage out of the capital providing Ethereum’s security.

AVSs can be any kind of blockchain-related protocol or service, and the few already live on EigenLayer’s mainnet encompass things like data availability, rollup creation and oracle data. Notably, these AVSs have struggled to turn a profit so far, as EigenLayer is yet to enable in-protocol payments.

Aligned Layer is an EigenLayer-secured protocol for verifying zero-knowledge proofs, which are cryptographic proofs showing a statement to be true without revealing the contents of the statement.

Aligned Layer hopes to make zero-knowledge proof verification cheaper. In a blog post explaining its decision to invest, Hack VC likened Aligned Layer to a data availability provider for zero-knowledge proofs.

Also this week, Othentic announced $4 million in seed funding led by Finality and Breyer Capital. Othentic offers a software stack that helps AVS developers spin up a distributed system based on EigenLayer’s shared security model.

Othentic “simplifies AVS development on EigenLayer with pre-built components, reduced engineering overhead and a faster time to market,” Nader Dabit, the director of developer relations at Eigen Labs, said on X.

Movement Labs raises $38M for Facebook’s coding language

This week’s largest fundraise came from Movement Labs, which raised a $38 million Series A led by Polychain.

Movement Labs is launching a layer-2 named Movement which makes use of the Move software stack developed by Facebook as part of its ill-fated blockchain push. The programming language Move is used today by layer-1 blockchains Aptos and Sui. Movement will be Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible, meaning programs written for Ethereum can be deployed on the layer-2.

Of note, Movement Labs is run by zoomers. Its founders are 21 and 24 years old, CoinDesk reported.

Other notable funding news

Turnkey raised $15 million for a wallet infrastructure service.
Pantera is looking to raise $1 billion for a new crypto fund, Bloomberg reported.
Founders Fund revealed an investment in the Alliance crypto accelerator.
Prime intellect unveiled a $5.5 million raise for decentralized AI development infrastructure.
The Shiba Inu memecoin raised $12 million via a token sale with non-US VCs, The Block reported.
Carv raised $10 million led by Tribe Capital and IOSG Ventures for a modular data layer.

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