Jacquelyn Melinek

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 <li>The capital raised will be used to grow its core products for Ethereum-compatible blockchains like layer-2 networks</li>
 <li>Aligned&#8217;s founder is the former chief strategy officer at ConsenSys</li>
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Aligned, a DeFi and Web3 infrastructure company, has secured $34 million in funding, the company announced on Thursday.



Investors include GSR, Altium Capital and Cavalry Fund, as well as individual investors like film producer Happy Walters. This is the firm&#8217;s first funding round, founder Sam Cassatt told Blockworks.



Cassatt, a former chief strategy officer at ConsenSys, said he formed Aligned to provide products for mining, high performance computing and staking and liquidity provisioning through an immutable, full-stack infrastructure for DeFi (decentralized finance).



“[We’re taking] a deep and thoughtful look at what the next generation infrastructure looks like for Web3,” Cassatt noted. “Web3 will have different architectures than Web2, and for us, we’re not just buying commodity hardware or renting it from AWS, we’re building custom hardware.”



In the past 12 months, demand for DeFi has grown astronomically. The total value locked in DeFi protocols has risen 237% from $55.36 billion to $186.55 billion year-over-year, <a href="https://defillama.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">data</a> from DeFi Llama shows. 



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">“Demand will continue to grow,” Cassatt said. “I don’t see this slowing down, it’s getting larger day by day.”&nbsp;</blockquote>



The capital raised will be used to grow its core products for Ethereum-compatible blockchains like layer-2 networks.



“My background is very devoted to Ethereum, and we help get it to market,” Cassatt said to Blockworks. “However, we would be remiss to only focus on the Ethereum network.”



Overall, liquidity needs to be deployed across many new architectures and frameworks, and Cassatt said the company works as much as possible to be agnostic to tokens and networks themselves.



Going forward, the firm plans to continue growing Web3 architecture to create more opportunities for crypto companies building in the space, Cassatt said.



“Our hope is that we can help secure networks and help companies get off the ground faster because we have infrastructure they can use.”



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