Liquid restaking protocol Puffer has raised $18 million in a Collection A funding spherical, the corporate mentioned Tuesday.
The spherical was led by Brevan Howard Digital and Electrical Capital, with investments from Coinbase Ventures, Kraken Ventures, Lemniscap, Franklin Templeton, Constancy, Mechanism, Lightspeed Faction, Consensys, Animoca and GSR, the corporate mentioned in a press launch.
The recent spherical of capital shall be used to assist launch Puffer’s mainnet. Previous to this, Puffer raised $5.5 million in a funding spherical co-led by Lemniscap and Lightspeed Faction.
Puffer is the second-largest liquid restaking protocol behind Ether.Fi, and is a part of a category of protocols which have come out of the rising “restaking” area that has taken the Ethereum ecosystem by storm. EigenLayer, a restaking pioneer that launched final week albeit with out a few of its extra extremely anticipated performance, has attracted some $12.7 billion of person deposits to change into the second-biggest decentralized-finance protocol, in response to DeFiLlama.
Liquid restaking protocols work by taking deposits and placing them into EigenLayer, which lets Ethereum stakers earn yield for utilizing their ETH tokens to assist safe third-party platforms generally known as “actively validated providers” (AVS). Puffer is an AVS on EigenLayer.
Puffer then palms out their very own token, pufETH, to its customers representing their deposit, permitting them to make use of that token for buying and selling or for different functions.
In March, Puffer handed $1 billion in deposits, signaling pleasure for restaking even earlier than the mainnet protocol has gone reside.
“With our upcoming mainnet launch, we purpose to considerably cut back the limitations for residence validators to take part, whereas delivering probably the most superior liquid restaking protocol,” mentioned Amir Amir Forouzani, CEO at Puffer Finance. “It is a main step ahead for Ethereum’s decentralization and the broader restaking ecosystem.”
Learn extra: Liquid Restaking Protocol Puffer Rakes in $1B in Deposits in Simply 3 Weeks
