Offchain Labs, a provider of scaling solutions for Ethereum, announced today that their Arbitrum One mainnet will open to the public today. The company also announced it has raised $120M in funding, with its latest Series B funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Other newly announced investors in the round include Polychain Capital, Ribbit Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Pantera Capital, Alameda Research, Mark Cuban, and others. Ravi Mhatre from Lightspeed has joined the company’s board with this round.
Layer-2
Arbitrum is a layer-2 solution for the Ethereum network that is developer-friendly and has a broad ecosystem of support. Since Arbitrum One’s beta launch for developers in May, the platform, which allows Ethereum users to transact with very low fees, has had over 350 projects sign up for access.
Offchain Labs built its platform in response to an increasing need for scaling Ethereum without compromising on the security of Ethereum as the base layer. Having EVM compatibility means that projects can deploy without changing the code in their contracts.
“We’ve had the pleasure of working closely with Steven, Ed, and Harry,” said Amy Wu, Partner at Lightspeed. “Their dedication to the Ethereum developer community is second to none and they have the best, easiest-to-use scalability product. That’s why over 400 projects have chosen to launch with Arbitrum, including Reddit.”
Broad Ecosystem of Support
Arbitrum is launching to end-users as scaling platforms surge in popularity, with key projects in the Ethereum space seeing traction in recent months with many of Arbitrum’s launch partners.
While almost all projects deploying on Arbitrum will be launched on Arbitrum One, Reddit recently announced that Arbitrum won The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-off and has chosen to launch their own layer-2 rollup using Arbitrum technology
Founding Team
Offchain Labs was co-founded by Ed Felten, former deputy U.S. chief technology officer in the Obama White House and longtime Professor at Princeton University. Ed started working on Arbitrum while at Princeton University where he met his co-founders, Steven Goldfeder and Harry Kalodner.
The three detailed the Arbitrum technology in a research paper while at Princeton that was published in 2018 once Ed returned from the White House. Offchain was officially born while the three were at Princeton with a mission to scale Ethereum and bring it to the masses. Steven holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and Ed and Steven are two of the authors of the leading textbook on cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies.
“We are excited to partner with our investors who understand the importance of scaling Ethereum and bringing the Ethereum ecosystem to the masses,” said Steven Goldfeder, co-founder, and CEO, Offchain Labs. “The tremendous support we’ve seen from developers across the globe validates our mission to be the first to marry the world of FinTech and Defi.”
Offchain Labs will use the new funding to scale the team, further develop the Arbitrum One ecosystem, build out new scaling solutions in its pipeline and invest in R&D.