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. 

Read more: What was behind the run on Renzo’s liquid restaked ETH?

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.

Read more: 0G Labs raises $35M for data availability, spurring competition with Celestia, EigenLayer, others

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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