Announced Friday, Stake Technologies, the company behind Plasm Network and Shiden Network, two hubs for building inter-blockchain compatible smart contracts across Polkadot, Kusama and beyond, has raised $10 million, led by Fenbushi Capital.
A long list of investors also participated in the raise including: Hypersphere Ventures, Gumi Cryptos, IOSG Ventures, TRG Capital, AU21 Capital, Digital Strategies, SNZ, Digital Strategies, Sub0 Capital, Altnomy, East Ventures and others. The round was also joined by notable angel investors including Nobuyuki Idei, ex-CEO and Chairman of Sony.
Stake Technologies will use the funding in the parachain auctions taking place over the coming weeks, to help win slots on both Polkadot and it’s more experimental cousin Kusama (Plasm is built on Polkadot; Shiden on Kusama).
Projects can pursue a direct sales approach, where tokens of the new network are sold in exchange for the native token of the respective parachain network, either DOT or KSM. Another strategy involves “crowdloans,” where tokenholders loan their DOT or KSM to be used as collateral for the parachain lease.
Stake Technologies has adopted a crowdloan-centric strategy for winning the Shiden parachain lease, incentivizing KSM holders to contribute, and offering SDN tokens as rewards. At the end of the lease period, which can range from six months to two years, the tokens are returned to their original holders. (On Kusama the lease period is capped to about 11 months.)
“Since meeting the Plasm team in 2019, when Stake Technologies was one of the very first teams building on Substrate in Longhash’s accelerator, we have been consistently impressed by the team’s ability to iterate and execute on their vision of bringing a scalable smart contract platform into the Polkadot ecosystem,” said Remington Ong, partner at Fenbushi Capital in a statement.
The Plasm and Shiden networks will bring a smart contract development layer to the Polkadot ecosystem that is interoperable with Ethereum and its various layer 2 scaling solutions, as well as other systems hosting apps like decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
“The multi-blockchain approach means that Plasm and Shiden will be key contributions to the overall parachain ecosystem, with their work on scaling benefiting every other future parachain,” said Jack Platts, Partner at Hypersphere Ventures in a statement.
Source: Coindesk
