Funding Wrap: Vitalik Buterin backs MegaLabs in its seed raise

Two prominent raises led this week’s funding rounds.

Let’s start with the most recent announcement, which came from the first “real-time blockchain” backed by heavy-hitters such as Vitalik Buterin. 

MegaLabs raised $20 million in a seed round backed by Dragonfly. The funds will be dedicated to developing MegaETH. Other investors included Figment Capital and Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin, as well as Jordan Fish (also known as Cobie).

Blockworks podcast hosts Santiago Santos and Mert Mumtaz also participated in the round. 

According to a press release accompanying the announcement, MegaETH is “capable of streaming transactions at 100,000 transactions per second with millisecond-level responsiveness. Its near-instant performance unlocks fully onchain applications that can finally match the experience of best-in-class Web2 apps while delivering on the promises of decentralization.”

Read more from our opinion section: Layer-3s are the future of scalability

“Creating hyper-scalable EVM implementations is a key prerequisite for truly scaling Ethereum. I am excited to see brilliant developers taking on this challenge,” Vitalik Buterin said in a statement shared on Telegram.

MegaETH’s testnet is set to go live this fall.

But it wasn’t the only funding round to hit double-digit raises this week.

Colosseum, a startup accelerator focused on Solana, announced a $60 million raise which will be put towards early-stage projects.

“The last 15 years of crypto has taught us that the best ideas often arise from the most uncommon corners of the internet. Colosseum’s mission is to ensure more of those ideas are brought into production and accelerate the growth of the onchain economy,” co-founder Clay Robbins wrote in an announcement. 

Other notable raises:

• Publicly traded bitcoin miner Hut 8 raised $150 million from Coatue through a convertible note. The firm plans to put the funding towards building out its high-performance computing vertical. 
• Infrastructure firm Conduit announced it raised $37 million in a Series A led by Paradigm and Haun Ventures. 
• Crossover Markets, a trading technology firm focused on crypto, raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Illuminate Financial and DRW Venture Capital.

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