Funding Round attributes
Byzantine Finance, a startup focused on institutionally-driven restaking, has successfully raised $3 million in a pre-seed funding round to advance its development of a permissionless "aggregation layer" protocol. The funding round was led by Node Capital and Blockwall Ventures, with participation from a wide array of other investors, including Lightshift, Masterkey, Kiln Ventures, as well as angel investors from EigenLayer and LayerZero.
The capital raised will be used to further develop Byzantine’s aggregation layer, a protocol designed to enable the seamless sharing of liquidity, state, and users across multiple blockchains. The goal of the protocol is to allow different blockchain networks to interact with each other without sacrificing sovereignty. This comes at a time when the crypto economy is rapidly evolving, and cross-chain interaction is becoming an essential component of the ecosystem.
Restaking, the technology behind Byzantine’s aggregation layer, is a growing trend in the crypto sector, especially within proof-of-stake-based protocols and networks. Restaking involves leveraging security assets staked across various protocols to ensure their safety while simultaneously providing users with additional yield generation opportunities. Byzantine’s protocol aims to provide institutional players with the ability to stake their assets to secure multiple networks at once, essentially enabling them to earn returns on their capital while participating in a wider range of blockchain protocols. The protocol is specifically tailored for institutions and professional investors, providing them with the tools to maximize their returns while ensuring the safety of their staked assets.
In a statement, co-founder Gaia Ferrero Regis shared the inspiration behind Byzantine’s protocol, saying, "As we began to research the foundations of Byzantine, we spoke with hundreds of institutional web3 players, and were surprised to hear how many of them were blocked from participating in restaking. We allow institutions to build secure, segregated restaking portfolios for their operational and risk needs, helping them maximize returns and turning restaking into an institutional-grade onchain primitive." The company’s approach aims to make restaking more accessible to institutional investors, who have previously been hindered by fragmentation in the ecosystem.
Byzantine’s platform addresses the fragmented nature of the current restaking ecosystem, which spans several networks such as Ethereum and its Layer 2 solutions, Solana, and even Bitcoin. The ability to share liquidity and state across these networks without compromising sovereignty is seen as a critical step towards making blockchain technology more efficient and interoperable, and Byzantine Finance’s solution is positioned to capitalize on this need.
The new funding will allow Byzantine Finance to continue building out its platform and expand its offering for institutional clients. The company aims to bring restaking into the institutional investment mainstream, providing a reliable, secure, and scalable solution for web3 institutions looking to leverage blockchain technology for yield generation. As the crypto economy continues to evolve and more institutional players enter the space, Byzantine’s aggregation layer could prove to be a crucial piece of infrastructure, helping to bridge the gap between blockchain networks and make decentralized finance more accessible for larger investors.
This $3 million funding round signifies the growing interest and investment in blockchain interoperability solutions, highlighting the demand for more robust and accessible systems to support institutional participation in the crypto economy. With a strong team and backing from a diverse group of investors, Byzantine Finance is well-positioned to make a significant impact in the evolving blockchain space.
