Subspace Labs Raises $33M Led by Pantera Capital To Further Web3 Efforts

Subspace Labs, developer of the layer-1 storage and compute network of its namesake, announced Tuesday that it had raised tens of millions of dollars to pursue its lofty Web3 ambitions.

Funding from the $32.9 million strategic financing round, led by Pantera Capital, will go toward tripling the size of its protocol engineering team, Subspace said in a press release. Subspace will also use the funds to expand its integrations team to further connections between Polkadot, Kusama and Ethereum ecosystems.

Participation also came from the likes of Coinbase Ventures, Crypto.com, Alameda Research, ConsenSys Mesh, KR1, Hypersphere Ventures, Stratos Technologies, AVG Blockchain Fund, GSR Ventures and Eniac Ventures, among others.

The developer said it would also use the new capital to build a new product team focused on attracting novice developers to use its Meta Services product.

Those services are to eventually include a unified chain history API known as MetaBlock, a multi-chain storage service for NFT metadata called MetaVault and MetaSwap, a cross-chain asset exchange protocol, per the release.

Subspace defines itself as a relatively new “eco-friendly” and scalable layer-1 blockchain that is able to serve as an infrastructure layer for “the entire Web3 ecosystem.” Meanwhile, the Subspace Network is under active development and is being built with the Parity Substrate framework, the same tool used to build the Polkadot blockchain, per the release.

“Pantera is thrilled to join Subspace as an investor to support its mission to build the foundational infrastructure for Web3,” said Joey Krug, co-chief investment officer at Pantera. “The R&D behind the Subspace Network’s scalability architecture will resolve critical issues holding back the growth of the blockchain industry as a whole.”

“With the support of our investors, Subspace is re-envisioning the types of apps that can be stored on and secured by a blockchain,” said Jeremiah Wagstaff, co-founder and CEO at Subspace Labs. “We are excited to empower builders with the tools and services they need to unlock the next wave of innovation in Web3.”

Founded in 2018, Subspace Labs was formed by protocol hackers Jeremiah Wagstaff and Nazar Mokrynskyi, who met via on GitHub. After several years of research and development, largely funded through a grant from the US National Science Foundation, the team raised $4.5 million in a seed round in June 2021.

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