Versatus Labs raises $2.3 million in seed round funding, bringing its valuation to $50 million.
The funding aims to develop the Verastus LASR, a Stateless Rollup.
Image: Versatus Labs
In an announcement this Wednesday, Verastus Labs, a peer-to-peer web service protocol aiming to enhance the transition of Web2 developers into Web3, confirmed the successful raise of $2.3 million in a seed funding round, bringing the total valuation to $50 million. The investment round was led by key investors in the Web3 industry including NGC Ventures and Republic Crypto.
Launched in 2020 as VRRB Labs, Versatus has transformed from a layer 1 solution into an Ethereum scaling solution providing users with a seamless frontier in decentralized verifiable compute innovation. The latest funding round, however, aims to extend development on the Verastus LASR, the world’s first stateless rollup, enabling developers to build smart contracts in their preferred language, with their preferred tools.
The pre-seed round raised $1.4 million from Jump Crypto, BigBrain Holdings, Taureon Group, and Hyperithm, seeing the company successfully pivoting into a scaling solution. With a total of $3.7 million raised by Verastus Labs in the past year, the team plans to bring the product to the masses.
Similar to traditional rollups, which do not maintain the entire state of transaction data, enhancing scalability, Versatus introduces its LASR (pronounced “laser”) platform which only allows “absolute necessary data” to be broadcast on the network’s base layer. The platform is purely an execution layer, which allows it to be on any layer on the network, without the high costs and inefficiencies associated with Ethereum.
As Smith explains, LASR will settle transactions on the Ethereum base layer, but it also can work with any layer or multiple blockchains.
“LASR can be a Layer 2 on top of a Layer 1, or it can be a Layer 3 on top of a Layer 2, and it can be an off-chain execution environment for Layer 1s,” Smith explains. “[It also reduces] the cost and inefficiencies of Ethereum, eliminates the friction and centralization associated with optimistic rollups, all while delivering a 100x better developer experience.”
LASR can be used to build complex and data-intensive smart contracts, enable cross-chain native asset transfers, cross-chain contract integrations, and much more.
A flurry of partnerships for Versatus Labs
Apart from the capital injection, Versatus Labs also announced its partnerships with EigenLayer, a data availability Web3 firm that provides ETH staking, validation processes on several networks, and an ecosystem for developers. Additionally, the company has also entered a strategic partnership with liquid staking platform Stader Labs, and Web3 venture Anagram.
Joseph Eagan, co-founder of Anagram praised Andrew Smith for his relentless focus on building a solution for developers, claiming he is the “most sober mind in the crypto space”. He added the new Verstus LASR solution will solve a real problem in the crypto space, taking crypto “from the fringes of the tech community and placing it at the center of innovation”
Adding to the compliments of the funding and the stateless rollup, Sreeram, founder of EigenLayer, explained the importance of stateless verification as a “key feature required to enable infinite scaling of optimistic rollups” while preserving verifiability by regular nodes. This allows the rollups to sample and verify portions of the state update instead of the whole transaction data while maintaining the security of the network.
“Stateless verifiers are a key milestone in the future of the Ethereum scaling roadmap and we are excited to partner with Versatus to bring this key unlock to the modular Ethereum landscape,” Sreeram added.
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