Puffer Finance, a George Town, Cayman Islands-based blockchain infrastructure company, closed its seed round, raising a total of $5.5m USD.
The round was co-led by Lemniscap and Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Brevan Howard Digital, Bankless Ventures, Animoca Ventures, DACM, LBK, SNZ, Canonical Crypto, 33DAO, WAGMI33, Concave, as well as angel investors including DiscusFish, Co-founder of F2Pool & Cobo; Sreeram Kannan, Founder of Eigen layer; Frederick Allen, Staking Sales Lead at Coinbase Institutional; Calvin Liu, Head of Strategy at Eigen Layer; Ramble, Founder of the North American Blockchain Association; Mr.Block: Core Contributor at Curve; Ladislaus von Daniels, Staking Educator, Richard Malone, Head of Business at Obol Labs.
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate the development of its open-source Secure-Signer solution for the public good, and to create a capital-efficient permissionless staking pool.
Co-founded by Amir Forouzani, and Jason Vranek, Puffer is defining a new industry standard for secure validator operations with the primary objective of preserving decentralization, with Anti-Slashing technologies designed to minimize the chance of slashing events. Its Secure-Aggregator technology provides the foundation to build a secure and scalable liquid staking protocol. Allowing permissionless and capital-efficient Node Operator (NoOp) participation allows anyone to join the PufferPool to help preserve Ethereum’s decentralization.
Puffer is advancing an open-source project Secure-Signer, a remote signing tool designed to prevent Ethereum validators from committing slashable offenses, limiting access to validator keys in order to mitigate the effect of software bugs and user errors while simultaneously protecting them from costly penalties that disproportionately impact solo stakers.
Additionally, the company is actively working on a protocol to lower the barrier of entry for at-home stakers and to help them unlock additional rewards, providing a financially viable alternative to centralized Liquid Staking Providers (LSPs), whose economies of scale can otherwise provide greater rewards by addressing the issue of inactivity penalties and implementing innovative anti-slashing technology. The protocol will effectively reduce the bond requirement from 32 ETH to just 2 ETH.
Puffer’s seed round follows an initial $650K raise in a pre-seed round led by Jump Crypto, and supported by IoTeX, Acanam Capital.
FinSMEs
08/08/2023