Ethereum Layer 2 developer Taiko announces $15 million Series A round ahead of mainnet launch
Taiko, a blockchain project focused on scalability Ethereum 
ETH
+1.07%
announced a $15 million Series A funding round as it prepares for its mainnet launch.
Lightspeed Faction, Hashed, Generative Ventures and Token Bay Capital co-led the funding round, Taiko said on Saturday. Other investors in this round include Wintermute Ventures, Flow Traders, Amber Group, OKX Ventures, and GSR.
It is unclear whether the round has fully ended. The announcement referred to the “end of commitments” and included a note that “certain investments remain subject to regulatory approval.” Taiko did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Block.
The Series A announcement comes about nine months after the project unveiled two rounds of $22 million funding in June. It’s unclear when Taiko began raising funds for its latest round, or whether it used stock, tokens, or a mixed structure. Co-founder and chief operating officer Terence Lam declined to comment on the timeline, structure or valuation, but said all three rounds have the same structure.
Taiko launched its sixth testnet last month and is preparing to launch its mainnet in the coming months.
What is Tycho?
Taiko is a layer 2 scaling startup that aims to make Ethereum cheaper while maintaining its core properties such as censorship resistance, permissionlessness, and security. We are building a “Type 1” ZK-EVM, an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible ZK rollup that supports zero-knowledge proof computations.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said in 2022, “Type 1 ZK-EVM strives to be completely and emphatically equivalent to Ethereum. It does not change any part of the Ethereum system to make proof generation easier.” . “Type 1 ZK-EVM is ultimately what is needed to increase the scalability of Ethereum Layer 1 itself.”
Taiko, which has been in development since 2022, launched its sixth testnet called Katla in January. The project claims to have verified over 1.1 million wallet addresses and over 13 million total transactions on Katla to date.
Katla used Taiko’s “contention-based rollup” design, a multi-proof rollup architecture featuring a contention mechanism and underlying sequencing, the project said.
“In the future, Taiko will develop a booster-based rollup, a design that addresses liquidity fragmentation issues by allowing developers to deploy on Ethereum and scale natively across all of Layer 2,” he added.
Tyco Mainnet Launch
Taiko planned to launch its mainnet by the first quarter of this year. When asked if that plan would remain the same, Lam said, “We will need to upgrade the Katla testnet to enable support for EIP-4844 and conduct one more stress test and security audit of the mainnet.”
He added, “The current completion outlook is before the end of the second quarter.”
Taiko currently has about 40 employees, and the project plans to grow the team through hiring across a variety of functions, including engineering, community and ecosystem growth, Lam said.
Tyco also plans to create an ecosystem investment fund with investors, the amount of which has not yet been confirmed, Lam added. Last December, Taiko announced it was allocating about $30 million to a second grant program.
Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet delivering news, research and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor in The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the cryptocurrency space. Cryptocurrency exchange Bitget is an anchor LP of Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to provide objective, impactful and timely information about the cryptocurrency industry. Below are our current financial disclosures.
© 2023 The Block. All rights reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not provided or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial or other advice.
