Lava Network, a developer of modular blockchain infrastructure, has raised $15 million in a seed funding round ahead of launching its mainnet.
Jump Capital, Hashkey Capital and Tribe Capital co-led the round, with North Island Ventures, Dispersion Capital, Alliance DAO, Node Capital, Finality Capital Partners and others also participating, Lava said on Thursday. Anonymous executives from Celestia, Cosmos, StarkWare, Filecoin and other blockchain ecosystems also participated in the round, Lava added.
Lava was founded in 2022. The company's CEO, Yair Kleber, said that the seed round closed last December. He declined to comment on the structure of the tour and evaluation.
What is Lava Network?
Lava is a modular blockchain network focused on providing access to data through remote procedure calls (RPCs) and indexing. In web3, application developers need to make RPC requests to send and retrieve blockchain data, while indexing helps them get specific data from the blockchain network.
“Developers use Lava to retrieve and send blockchain data (“blockchain access”),” Klepper said. “New threads and APIs are added permissionless to Lava, which means the network can support access to all websites3 dynamically and quickly.”
Lava can be compared to the popular Celestia benchmark network, but the latter focuses on data availability, and the former focuses on data access, Klepper said.
Lava Network is currently in testnet. Last month, it launched an incentivized public RPC service on NEAR, Evmos, Axelar and other blockchains and plans to add more chains in the near future.
Blockchain node operators join Lava and get rewarded for providing high-performance RPCs. “The rewards are distributed based on the volume of service provided and the quality of service, i.e. speed, uptime and accuracy, thus improving performance for developers and users,” Klepper said.
Lava aims to launch its mainnet in the first half of this year. There are currently 26 people working at Lava, 20 of whom are blockchain engineers, Klepper said, adding that the project is looking to hire more people.
Lava aims to bring its modular approach to oracles, serialization, and other blockchain data infrastructure in the future, serving as a “permissionless everything repository for any web3 service.”
Magma lava bonus points
Before its main network, Lava today introduced a reward points program called Magma. Users can earn Magma points by switching their RPC connection to Lava, Klepper said. He declined to comment on whether Magma points would be redeemable for a special Lava token in the future.
Points are becoming increasingly popular among cryptocurrency projects to reward loyal users. Cryptocurrency projects have offered more than 40 billion reward points to date, The Block recently reported.
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