Astar Network, Multichain Smart Contract Platform on Polkadot, Raises $22M in Strategic Round led by Polychain.
Today, we are extremely excited to announce a $22M strategic fundraise with participation from Polychain, Alameda Research, Alchemy Ventures, Animal Ventures, Crypto.com Capital, Digital Finance Group, GSR, ROK Capital, Scytale Ventures, Vessel, Injective Protocol, and angel investors including Dr. Gavin Wood, Richard Ma, Keisuke Honda, and some executives from Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies.
“Astar is making a highly competitive bid for new developers to the Polkadot space, and we’re excited to be partnering with them. The project’s focus on including additional WASM-compiling languages in their EVM’s compatibility should help attract development in many more programming languages, and their dApp staking platform represents an innovative new approach to bootstrapping and funding an emergent ecosystem. “
Ben Perszyk, Partner at Polychain Capital
Astar Network secured a Polkadot Parachain slot last December and launched its mainnet on January 17th, after 2.5 years of development. Astar is the first multichain smart contract platform that allows developers to earn tokens for building smart contracts or infrastructure, #Build2Earn. Stake Technologies, the core company behind Astar Network, previously raised $10M led by Binance Labs and Fenbushi followed by OKX Ventures and Huobi Capital. This round was mainly for US investors and strategic partners, allowing Astar Network to increase its geographical reach.
Why is Astar special?
2021 was the year of L1 blockchains — a lot of L1 blockchains were born and received substantial traction. However, there are still 2 major problems: interoperability and lack of developer incentives. Astar has solutions for these problems.
First, Astar is supporting both Ethereum Virtual Machine and WebAssembly. Developers can deploy existing Solidity contracts as well as Polkadot native smart contracts. In addition to that, Astar supports multiple EVM and non-EVM L1 bridges. Currently, Ethereum bridges are already delivered by Multichain and Celer Network, and Cosmos bridge is planned to be delivered in Q1. Secondly, Astar natively supports #Build2Earn protocol. #Build2Earn protocol distributes basic income to developers on Astar Network. By building a product on Astar, developers can earn $ASTR tokens as basic income from block rewards based on their performance and decentralized voting. This serves as a strong incentive for developers to choose Astar.
Next Steps
Becoming a Polkadot parachain was a huge milestone for the team, but this is the first step for Astar Network. The team strongly believes in the multichain future. Astar is going to be a multichain smart contract hub by connecting multiple L1 chains and supporting multiple smart contract virtual machines. Currently, 2 Ethereum bridges are live and 1 Cosmos bridge is under heavy development. We will connect all major chains by Q4 this year.
Check out our complete roadmap for 2022:
About Astar
Astar Network is a dApp hub on Polkadot that supports Ethereum, WebAssembly, and layer 2 solutions like ZK Rollups. Astar aims to be a multi-chain smart contract platform that will support multiple blockchains and virtual machines. Polkadot Relay Chain doesn’t support smart contracts. That’s why it’s important for the ecosystem to have a parachain that enables this for all developers who want to build in the Polkadot ecosystem. Astar is here to provide the best solution for all developers by supporting EVM and making a parachain where EVM and WASM smart contracts can co-exist and communicate with each other.
