- In a pre-seed investment round headed by Hack VC and Castle Island Ventures, SatLayer has raised $8 million.
- Today marks the inauguration of this Bitcoin restaking platform, which is based on Babylon.
In a pre-seed investment round, $8 million was raised by SatLayer, a Bitcoin restaking platform based on the Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon.
According to SatLayer on Thursday, Franklin Templeton, OKX Ventures, Mirana Ventures, Amber Group, Big Brain Holdings, CMS Holdings, and other investors co-led the round alongside Hack VC and Castle Island Ventures. APriori, Custodia Bank, LayerZero, Manta Network, Magic Eden, Sui, and Pendle were among the companies that contributed undisclosed angel investments to the round.
A pre-seed round of $8 million is noteworthy. The project’s original goal, according to co-founder of SatLayer Luke Xie, was to raise $4 million, but within a month of starting fundraising in April, the round was oversubscribed. Xie stated that SatLayer had raised twice as much as its original goal, but that interested parties may still contribute up to $16 million in startup money.
According to Xie, there was a lot of interest in making Bitcoin the primary collateral asset for protecting decentralized infrastructure and apps, which would improve ecosystem security as a whole.
Xie stated that the pre-seed round was set up as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) with token warrants, but she would not discuss the startup’s investment amount.
SatLayer: What is it?
Built on Babylon, a protocol intended to connect Bitcoin to yield-bearing proof-of-stake networks, SatLayer is a platform for retaking Bitcoin. By locking up their staked assets once more in various protocols called as Bitcoin-verified services (BVSs) in SatLayer’s instance and actively validated services (AVSs) in the Ethereum and Solana restaking ecosystems, users can earn further benefits through restaking.
SatLayer is the first Bitcoin restaking platform developed on Babylon, according to Xie. He continued by saying that although Symbiotic, a protocol supported by Paradigm, also provides Bitcoin restaking using wrapped bitcoins and TBTC, its fundamental design is based on Ethereum rather than Babylon.
According to Xie, SatLayer enables customers to restake their Bitcoin and Bitcoin liquid-staking tokens from BVS-securing platforms including Solv Protocol, Lombard, Bedrock, pStake, and PumpBTC.
Many in the industry, particularly those that have been in operation for a few years, have sizeable bitcoin holdings that are idle and could be better utilized, he continued.
Users will receive incentives from SatLayer in the form of points. Xie responded, “We don’t have formalized plans for the token yet, and we will announce at later stage if/when details are available,” when asked if those points would eventually be transformed into SatLayer’s native cryptocurrency.
At the moment, SatLayer employs roughly ten people, and Xie is hiring for a variety of roles in engineering, research, product, and go-to-market.
Disclaimer : This article was created for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. An asset’s past performance does not predict its future returns. Before making an investment, please conduct your own research, as digital assets like cryptocurrencies are highly risky and volatile financial instruments.
