Announcing Our $12m Round from 82 Leading L2s, Defi Protocols, Exchanges, and Staking Service Providers.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised a $12m round in what we believe is the most diverse ecosystem round in the space! 🚀

We started Connext in 2017 with a simple thesis:

Decentralized protocols have the power to put value and ownership back into the hands of individuals. This can only happen if using them is simple enough that they are accessible by anyone.

Our focus on UX pushed us towards L2 research, which we saw as the biggest barrier to adoption in 2018. In partnership with Spankchain and with grant funding from the Ethereum Foundation, we built the first ever general-purpose L2 payment system (using state channels) on Ethereum.

In the years since then, we’ve learned a couple of really important lessons:

1. There are many different approaches to L2 systems, and the reality is that scaling Ethereum is a huge problem that will need to be solved from many angles at once.
2. Enabling seamlessly moving between L2 systems, Ethereum-compatible chains, and Ethereum itself is an equally important UX problem that we are uniquely positioned to solve.

Over the years, we’ve also built a wonderful community of supporters and stakeholders (many of whom have participated in this round!). It’s because of their tireless advice and mentorship that we’re here today. We love you guys, thank you all for believing in us! ❤️

Last year, the combination of our learnings and amazing advice from stakeholders led us to build the first ever PoC of L2-L2 transfers. We were blown away by how the community responded, and quickly shipped a mainnet implementation, growing 50% week over week to recently hit $40m in weekly network volume!

As an interoperability protocol, we believe we win by building the greatest ecosystem in the space. We also see Connext as public infrastructure that will eventually be fully owned and operated by the community.

With this round, we decided to push for a highly diverse set of participants. This helps us keep governance around Connext in the hands of the broader community, and brings on a large set of key stakeholders that can support our mission to be the leading interoperability protocol for L2 Ethereum.

We plan to use the funds from the raise to continue building out our team and on scaling up liquidity within the network.