Cryptocurrency staking protocol Symbiotic closed a $29 million Series A funding round led by Web3-focused investment firms, including Pantera Capital and Coinbase Ventures, to support the launch of a new economic coordination layer for blockchain security.
The round included more than 100 angel investors, with participation by major industry players from Aave, Polygon and StarkWare, the company said in an April 23 announcement shared with Cointelegraph.
The closing of the funding round also marks the launch of Symbiotic’s Universal Staking Framework, which aims to be an economic coordination layer that bolsters blockchain security via staking.
The new staking layer enables the use of any combination of cryptocurrencies to secure networks, including monolithic and modular layer-1 and layer-2 blockchains, the announcement stated.
“We’ve created a modular framework that lets protocols evolve security models over time while efficiently coordinating risk,” Misha Putiatin, co-founder of Symbiotic, told Cointelegraph. “This empowers protocols at every stage of their lifecycle to evolve their security models seamlessly without rebuilding infrastructure.”
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The “next step” in blockchain infrastructure
The new staking layer is the “next step in blockchain infrastructure” due to unlocking “economic coordination between assets and networks that were previously impossible,” according to Paul Veradittakit, managing partner at Pantera Capital.
“As the number and variety of onchain assets continue to increase, Symbiotic allows them to easily serve as economic security while enabling entirely new use cases across DeFi,” he added.
Blockchain networks looking to bolster security can adopt Symbiotic’s network of decentralized validators that bring “programmable security” without the need to modify infrastructure.
According to the company, 14 networks, including Hyperlane, Spark and Avail, have already adopted the new coordination layer, with 20 more expected to follow.
The staking layer enables “any protocol, including L1s, bridges, oracles, and even emerging verticals like artificial intelligence or zero-knowledge systems, to configure their own validator sets, incentive mechanisms and slashing conditions without having to rebuild core infrastructure,” Putiatin said.
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