Taiko, a blockchain project focused on scaling Ethereum ETH
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announced a $15 million Series A funding round as it prepares to launch its mainnet.
Lightspeed Faction, Hashed, Generative Ventures and Token Bay Capital co-led the funding round, Taiko said on Saturday. Other investors participating in the round included Wintermute Ventures, Flow Traders, Amber Group, OKX Ventures and GSR.
It is not clear whether the cycle is completely closed; the announcement mentions “closing of commitments” and includes a note that “certain investments remain subject to regulatory approval.” Taiko did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Block.
The Series A announcement comes about nine months after the project unveiled two funding rounds worth $22 million last June. It is unclear when Taiko began raising funds for the latest round and whether it used an equity, token, or mix structure. Co-founder and COO Terence Lam declined to comment on timing, structure and valuation, but said all three rounds had the same structure.
Taiko launched its sixth testnet last month and is preparing to launch its mainnet in the coming months.
What is Taiko?
Taiko is a Tier 2 startup that aims to make Ethereum cheaper while maintaining its core properties, such as censorship resistance, security, and permissionlessness. It builds a “Type 1” ZK-EVM – a ZK rollup compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine that supports zero-knowledge proof computation.
“Type 1 ZK-EVMs strive to be fully and uncompromisingly equivalent to Ethereum. They do not modify any part of the Ethereum system to facilitate proof generation,” said Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin , in 2022. “Type 1 ZK-EVM EVMs are what we ultimately need to make Ethereum Layer 1 itself more scalable.”
In development since 2022, Taiko launched its sixth testnet called Katla in January. The project claims to have seen over 1.1 million wallet addresses and over 13 million total transactions to date on Katla.
Katla used Taiko’s “contestable rollup-based” design, a multiple-proof rollup architecture that includes a challenge mechanism and based sequencing, the draft states.
“In the future, Taiko will develop the rollup based booster, a design that solves the liquidity fragmentation problem by allowing developers to deploy on Ethereum and scale natively across all layers 2,” he said. he adds.
Taiko Mainnet Launch
Taiko had planned to launch its mainnet by the first quarter of this year. When asked if this plan was intact, Lam replied: “We definitely need to upgrade our Katla testnet to enable support for EIP-4844 and perform an additional round of stress testing and d security audit for the main network.
“The current outlook for completion of this work is before the end of the second quarter,” he added.
Taiko currently has about 40 people and the project is looking to grow its team by hiring across multiple functions, including engineering, community and ecosystem growth, Lam said.
Taiko also plans to create an ecosystem investment fund with its investors, the amount of which has not yet been finalized, Lam added. In December, Taiko announced an allocation of approximately $30 million for its second round of grant programs.
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