Web3 infrastructure startup Blocknative lands $15M for Ethereum block building

Blocknative, a San Francisco-based startup that provides infrastructure for the Ethereum blockchain, announced Thursday that it has raised $15 million in a new round of funding to provide what’s known as the “block building” marketplace. ” created by Ethereum Merge.

Funding for the Series A-1 round came from Blockchain Capital, Foundry Group, Rho, IOSG Ventures, Robot Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, HackVC, and Industry Ventures, among others. This financing brings the total raised by the company to $34 million to date.

The Ethereum merger, which was completed on September 15, changed the blockchain from “proof of work” to “proof of stake”. That fundamentally changed the way transactions are validated on the network and introduced “block builders” as a major economic factor. Block builders determine which transactions are added to blocks and how they are ordered.

Since the merger, the relay and Blocknative builders have added more than 19,000 blocks to the Ethereum blockchain, according to MEVboost.org. That has put Blocknative among the top block builders on the public blockchain.

Shortly after the merger, Blocknative launched its block-building MEV streaming service. MEV stands for “maximum mineable value,” which is the process by which individual traders creating new blocks on the network can further benefit by ordering transactions using their control over the network. Through the MEV relay, they could extract more value than the usual block reward they would receive for validating blocks on the network.

“With this new round of funding, Blocknative is ideally positioned to aggressively seize the block creation opportunity and help drive the recirculation of equitable value throughout the Web3 transaction supply chain,” said Matt Cutler, Co-Founder. and CEO of Blocknative.

In addition to providing an infrastructure that allows Ethereum validators to create more profitable transaction packages, Blocknative also offers a number of other services with its blockchain infrastructure solutions. These solutions include transaction preview, built-in Web3 application integration, mempool browser, transaction cost estimator, and high-speed transaction distribution network.

“Blocknative has been a core infrastructure provider for many major Web3 projects,” Queenie Wu, a partner at IOSG Ventures, said of the funding. “I first connected with them while leading partnerships for a major Ethereum wallet provider and was impressed with the reliability and quality of their platform.”

Blocknative Relay has been adopted by many of the major Ethereum staking pool operators and is now used by more than 290,000 registered validators, or more than 60% of the global network.

The infrastructure that the company builds is used by many well-known projects, including the MetaMask crypto wallet, decentralized finance app Lido, decentralized exchange Curve, Ethereum Foundation, Polygon Foundation, and many others.

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