March 30th, 2021 at 12:00 pm UTC · 3 min read
PureStake, the company developing the Moonbeam smart contract platform, announced the completion of a $6 million strategic round led by CoinFund, a leading blockchain-focused investment firm. The round included participation from Binance Labs, ParaFi, Coinbase Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, IOSG Ventures, as well as previous seed investors. This round of funding will be used to hire development resources, build additional integrations and developer tools, perform third-party security audits, and establish a market presence in Asia. These activities will position the team for a successful launch of the Moonbeam network in 2021.
Moonbeam has quickly grown to become one of the most prominent parachains in the Polkadot ecosystem. In the six months since closing a seed round and launching a TestNet in September 2020, dozens of projects have begun building on — and integrating with — the Moonbeam network. Examples of protocols with planned or live integrations on Moonbeam include SushiSwap, Balancer, IDEX, Seascape, Linear Finance, and Ocean Protocol.
Jake Brukhman, CEO of CoinFund, said:
“We see enormous potential in the Polkadot space, and Moonbeam is setting the state of the art of Ethereum compatibility on Polkadot as well as developing a robust smart contracting facility in the new network. We are pleased to be able to support the Moonbeam team as they continue to make incredible technical progress in this space.”
Wei Zhou, Head of Binance Labs, said:
“We hope that this strategic round will be a stepping stone for Moonbeam as they work to make their Ethereum-compatible network a reality. We support Moonbeam, believing that it will be one of the notable parachains of the Polkadot ecosystem.”
The PureStake team plans to launch the Moonbeam network in a multi-phased approach similar to the one previously employed for the Polkadot network launch: a TestNet parachain deployment (currently live), the Moonriver network deployment to Kusama, followed by a Moonbeam network deployment for Polkadot (planned for later this year). This funding round will help the team plan and successfully launch each deployment, including third-party security audits of the code, as soon as the functionality is available.
The funding round also included a broad set of prominent venture capital firms across the blockchain industry including Hypersphere Ventures, Hashkey, Arrington XRP, A195, KR1, D1 Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Divergence Ventures, and Signum Capital.
Derek Yoo, CEO of PureStake and Founder of the Moonbeam project, says:
“From the beginning, we have prioritized broad and strategic distribution when fundraising. The partnerships forged in this round — which include some of the most well-respected names in the industry — will provide us with the capital, guidance, and global traction we need to launch the Moonbeam network and establish it as a center of DeFi, NFT, and other activity on Polkadot.”
The Moonbeam and Moonriver parachains are expected to launch later this year, once parachain functionality has been enabled on Polkadot and Kusama, respectively.
Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on the Polkadot network that makes it easy to build natively interoperable applications. This Ethereum compatibility allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and DApp frontends to Moonbeam with minimal changes. As a parachain on the Polkadot network, Moonbeam will benefit from the shared security of the Polkadot relay chain and integrations with other chains that are connected to Polkadot. Currently in active development by PureStake, Moonbeam is expected to reach MainNet by mid-2021.
Led by Derek Yoo, former Fuze Founder and CTO, PureStake provides protocol implementation services and creates developer tools for next-generation blockchain networks. PureStake’s team has extensive experience building technology companies and complex software platforms.