Ethereum liquid staking protocol Puffer Finance raises $18M in Series A
Puffer Finance, a liquid staking project built on top of Ethereum's blockchain protocol Eigenlayer, has secured $18 million in Series A funding to launch its mainnet.
According to an April 16 announcement, the round was led by Brevan Howard Digital and Electric Capital along with Coinbase Ventures, Kraken Ventures, Lemniscap, Franklin Templeton, Avon Ventures (a VC fund affiliated with Fidelity Investments' parent company), Mechanism, Lightspeed Faction, Consensys, Animoca, GSR and other angels. Investors.
According to data from Defilama, after passing the first round of testing in February, Puffer Finance surpassed its total value locked (TVL) of $1.2 billion. To date, the protocol has raised a total of $23.5 million in venture capital funding.
“Following this round, Puffer has received a strategic investment from Binance Labs to strengthen its position in the liquidity recovery ecosystem,” Puffer Finance said in the announcement, citing “technological development” with its main network.
Puffer Finance's technology allows Ethereum validators to reduce their capital to just 1 Ether (ETH), down from the 32 ETH required for individual stakeholders. Additionally, users who sell Ether through Puffer will receive Puffer liquid restaking tokens (nLRTs), which can be used to develop products in other decentralized finance protocols at the same time as Ethereum stock rewards.
The process, which has long been implemented by other blockchains such as Cosmos, was transferred to Ethereum after a merger update that transitioned the network to proof-of-concept. “We aim to significantly lower the barriers to participation for home verifiers while offering the most advanced liquid recovery protocol,” Puffer Labs Chief Contributor Amir Foruzani said in a press release.
On March 6, Cointelegraph reported that EigenLayer shot decentralized financial lending protocol Aave in TVL, with the $10.4 billion worth of crypto committed to the protocol after temporarily removing how much stake users could hold.
Dune Analytics data shows that EigenLayer has more than 107,900 unique depositors, while Defillama statistics show that 74% of the tokens held are Wrapped Ether (wETH) and Lido Staked Eth (stETH). Liquid Stake protocols are currently the largest DeFi protocol category, with a market value of around $55 billion across 160 protocols – mainly purchased by Lido, which is the largest protocol with a locked-in value of $35 billion.
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