Astar Network announced this Friday, January 28, through its Twitter account, a fundraising of $22 million, with the participation of Polychain, Dr. Gavin Wood, Alameda Research, Alchemy, Crypto.com and other investors.
“Today, we are very excited to announce a $22 million strategic fundraiser with participation from Polychain, Alameda Research, Alchemy Ventures, Animal Ventures, Crypto.com Capital, Digital Finance Group, GSR, ROK Capital, Scytale Ventures, Vessel, Injective Protocol and angel investors, including Dr. Gavin Wood, Richard Ma, Keisuke Honda, and some executives from the Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies”, he said through an article published on the Medium platform.
Ben Perszyk, Partner at Polychain Capital, commented that “Astar is making a very competitive offer for new developers in the Polkadot space, and we are excited to partner with them. The project’s focus on including additional WASM build languages in its EVM support should help attract development in many more programming languages, and its dApp engagement platform represents an innovative new approach to driving and funding an emerging ecosystem”.
Similarly, Astar Network secured a Polkadot Parachain space last December and launched its mainnet on January 17, after 2.5 years of development. Astar is the first multi-chain smart contract platform that allows developers to earn tokens to build smart contracts or infrastructure, #Build2Earn. Stake Technologies, the parent company behind the Astar Network, previously raised $10 million led by Binance Labs and Fenbushi, followed by OKX Ventures and Huobi Capital. This round was primarily for US investors and strategic partners, allowing Astar Network to increase its geographic reach.
Also read: Fetch.ai announced strategic partnership with Unicred
Why is Astar special?
The company explained that 2021 was the year of L1 blockchains: many L1 blockchains were born and received substantial traction. However, there are still 2 main problems: interoperability and lack of incentives for developers. Astar has solutions for these problems.
“First, Astar is compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine and WebAssembly. Developers can implement existing Solidity contracts as well as native Polkadot smart contracts. On top of that, Astar supports multiple EVM and non-EVM L1 bridges. Currently, Ethereum bridges are already delivered by Multichain and Celer Network, and the Cosmos bridge is planned to be delivered in the first quarter. Second, Astar natively supports the #Build2Earn protocol. The #Build2Earn protocol distributes basic income to developers on the Astar Network. By building a product on Astar, developers can earn $ASTR tokens as basic income from block rewards based on performance and decentralized voting. This serves as a strong incentive for developers to choose Astar”, he said.
