Funding Wrap: Startup co-founded by former FTX employees land $17M

Plus, restaking continues to draw investment and Dan Held announces a bitcoin fund

March 3, 2024 10:00 am

OA_Creation/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

A startup co-founded by the former FTX general counsel and former head of strategy at FTX.US has raised $17 million in a Series A led by Placeholder VC, with a valuation of $120 million.

The startup, Backpack, is an exchange and wallet, also home to the popular Solana NFT project MadLads.

Newsletter

Subscribe to Blockworks Daily

Having previously been backed by FTX Ventures, Backpack was hit badly financially following the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange.

Loading Tweet..

The company has turned things around since, with MadLads NFTs’ floor price currently sitting at over $23,000, according to CoinGecko.

Backpack is not the only company led by former FTX employees that has raised funding as of late, with former FTX.US president Brett Harrison recently securing $12 million for his new derivatives exchange.

Restaking is still top-of-mind

Restaking protocol ether.fi has received $23 million in a Series A led by Bullish Capital and CoinFund. This will be in addition to the $4 million in SAFE funding it secured late last year.

This raise follows EigenLayer’s $100 million haul from Andreessen Horowitz, showing that restaking is top of mind for many investors today.

In addition to ether.fi and EigenLayer, a project called BounceBit, which focuses on bitcoin restaking, has also secured $6 million in funding.

Other notable fundraises

Longtime bitcoiner Dan Held raised a $21 million fund for bitcoin.
Avail raised $27 million to address interoperability in a seed funding round led by Founders Fund and Dragonfly.
Karma3 Labs secured $4.5 million to build a reputation protocol in a round led by Galaxy Digital and IDEO CoLab Ventures.
Payments infrastructure startup Sphere landed $2.8 million in a seed round led by TCG Crypto and Jump Crypto.

Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Blockworks Daily: Unpacking crypto and the markets.
Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.
Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.
0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox.
Lightspeed: All things Solana.
The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.
Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.

Tags

Newsletter

Blockworks Daily

Upcoming Events

Digital Asset Summit 2025

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

buy tickets learn more

Permissionless IV

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

buy tickets learn more

Permissionless IV Hackathon

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

learn more

recent research

Research

Ethena: Evolving into an Institutional DeFi Chain

Ethena Labs is leaping from its flagship synthetic dollar, USDe, to a full product suite—USDtb, iUSDe, and the Arbitrum-based Converge Chain—designed to marry crypto-native yields with TradFi-grade compliance. Our analysis shows how expanding into CME, ETF options, and tokenized Treasuries could lift protocol revenue from sub-$500 million in a bear case to several billion dollars if favorable regulation and institutional adoption align.

by Daniel Shapiro