Paradigm leads Layer-1 Monad's $225 million funding round

The latest funding raised Monad's valuation to $3 billion, making it the blockchain project that raised the most money in 2024, as well as in 2023.

After nearly a month of expressing the "wish" to raise an amount of about 200 million USD, a source from Fortune said, Monad Labs, the company behind the layer-1 blockchain Monad, officially completed a capital call of 225 million USD led by Paradigm took the lead with the participation of investment funds such as Electric Capital and Greenoaks Capital - a venture fund led by veteran investor Neil Mehta, after a small investment in the bankrupt FTX exchange.
The latest funding raised Monad's valuation to $3 billion, and became the blockchain project that raised the most money in 2024, as well as in 2023 - second only to Wormhole ($225 million), a Another project also comes from Jump Crypto.

Monad is a layer-1 blockchain that uses Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism and is compatible with EVM, aiming to achieve transaction speeds of up to 10,000/s thanks to the Parallel Execution feature (parallel execution). , solving remaining shortcomings with the largest smart contract blockchain today, Ethereum.
Monad claims to have optimized throughput and can process up to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS). However, this can be difficult for node operators because it requires twice as much hardware as the main Ethereum blockchain. In a technical document last September, the project revealed that it would issue a “mon” token with the function of paying transaction fees on the network, but deleted this information shortly after.

The project was developed by former employees of Wall Street's Jump Trading investment fund and Jump Crypto cryptocurrency investment arm, which raised $19 million in a seed round in February 2023 with the participation of Dragonfly Capital. and many famous angel investors in the cryptocurrency industry.

Avichal Garg, managing partner of Electric Capital said:

"...90% of developers working on various crypto ecosystems only work on EVM chains. That means Monad will be at a disadvantage in some cases when competing against designer blockchains. new programming languages like Aptos and Sui...but I believe that the project still has the potential to rise because of its ability to be 'friendly' to developers."
Talking to Fortune, Monad founder Keone Hon said the project will soon launch a public testnet in the next few months, and is expected to launch the mainnet by the end of this year.
On the evening of April 4, Ellipsis Labs announced successfully raising $20 million in Series A round, led by Paradigm investment fund.

Electric Capital, along with many notable figures such as Justin Drake and Mike Neuder (Ethereum Foundation), Sreeram Kannan (EigenLayer), Anatoly Yakovenko (Solana Labs) and Uri Klarman (bloXroute) also participated in the funding.

With new financial potential, Ellipsis Labs will continue to further develop its DeFi technology system.

Ellipsis Labs' flagship product is Phoenix, a decentralized exchange (DEX) with an order placement mechanism that operates on the Solana blockchain. One of Phoenix's outstanding features is its ability to process transactions instantly, without the need for the "crank" mechanism commonly used in the Solana ecosystem, thereby helping to increase stability in the trading environment. .

With a current TVL figure of 14.58 million USD, Phoenix is ranked as the 8th largest DEX on the Solana ecosystem. In the past 24 hours, the platform has attracted nearly 240 million USD in trading volume.

Previously in August 2023, Ellipsis Labs raised $3.3 million in seed round funding, led by Electric Capital.
Paradigm is an investment fund established in 2018 with the motto "crypto native", which means that all projects in which this fund invests will be completely related to cryptocurrency.
Their investment tendency often focuses on the early stages of potential projects for long-term investment. As mentioned above, Paradigm not only invests money but also helps projects in other aspects such as engineering, marketing, human resources and strategic planning.

Paradigm's team
Fred Ehrsam - Co-Founder & Managing Partner
Fred Ehrsam is co-founder of Paradigm investment fund. Previously, he served as co-founder of Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency company in the United States, and served as president from 2012 to 2017. Before Coinbase, Fred Ehrsam was a foreign exchange trader at Goldman Sachs in New York.
Matt Huang - Co Founder & Managing Partner
Along with Fred Ehrsam, Matt Huang co-founded the Paradigm investment fund. Previously, Matt was a partner at Sequoia Capital, where his primary role was focused on the firm's venture investments across a variety of sectors including cryptocurrency. Matt Huang is the founder and CEO of Hotspots, a company acquired by X (former Twitter) in 2012. He is also an angel investor in companies like Bytedance and Instacart.
Alana Palmedo - COO & Managing Partner
Alana Palmedo is the COO and executive manager of Paradigm investment fund, where she will be responsible for supervising and managing the company. Previously, Alana Palmedo was a member of the Boston University endowment office, where she was responsible for finding alternatives and managing private equity and venture capital. Alana Palmedo began her wealth management career in 2008 at Cascade Investment, the investment office of Bill & Melinda Gates.

Outstanding projects that Paradigm has invested in
Optimism (OP)
Grasping the market's needs for interacting with Ethereum, Optimism was born to solve a core problem: transaction fees. With such a mindset, the Optimism team has "put on" Ethereum a new shirt called Layer 2 using Optimistic Rollups technology. This solution helps users transact quickly and at a cheaper price, while still inheriting the superior security of Ethereum.
The way Optimism uses it is that its rollup will not be calculated but uses an anti-fraud mechanism to verify the validity of transactions. If the transaction shows signs of fraud, Optimistic rollup will stop the transaction and perform tests through the transaction validation algorithm using available data. This not only protects users but also improves network uptime.


DefiLlama statistics about Optimism

According to DefiLlama statistics, in terms of TVL volume, Optimism is ranked 9th after names such as: Tron, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, BNB Chain,... Currently, the total transaction volume on Optimism is at 614 million USD and total transaction fees reached 276,229 USD. From there, it can be seen that, although not yet the top chain, Optimism is still a chain with a stable and loyal user base.

StarkWare
Just like Optimism, StarkWare also offers a Layer 2 solution based on Ethereum. But what makes StarkWare different is that it serves two separate customer files on the same solution. Both products that this project provides allow users to interact with Ethereum at a cheaper price and faster speed. StarkEX will provide a full set of tools for each specialized project, while Starknet will be a decentralized Layer 2 network, allowing developers to build Dapps and users to interact on it.
Coinbase
Coinbase is one of the top three exchanges in the cryptocurrency market (after Binance and Bybit). Coinbase is also the exchange most trusted by Americans and is also the only crypto company listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Currently, customers can trade more than 238 crypto assets and 395 crypto trading pairs on this exchange.
Blur
Targeted at professional traders, Blur in addition to being an NFT marketplace, is also an NFT aggregator developed on Ethereum. Users can fully manage their NFT portfolio with the in-depth analytics that Blur provides.
Blast
Blast is a Layer 2 project built on Optimism based on Optimistic rollup technology and compatible with EVM. Blast's goal is to provide native yield to users holding ETH and stablecoins directly from Ethereum, the first project to do so in the cryptocurrency market.