on the crypto
Blockchain startup CasperLabs grossed $ 14 million from a group of investors who pledged to support its Casper proof-of-stake network at launch.
55 investors to support the network
CasperLabs CEO Mrinal Manohar confirmed the pre-sale of the private CLX token and further revealed that Digital Strategies led theinvestment, with the participation of HashKey Capital and Blockchange Ventures, as well as 52 others.
Nearly half of the subscribers already owned CasperLabs shares, he said. All together, the 55 new CLX owners own a share of the Casper network. Casper's future node runners will lend strong and secure initial support to the company's upcoming blockchain based in Switzerland.
Looking ahead and envisioning Casper's mainnet launch and then the public sale of the native token, these “genesis validators,” as Manohar called them, will confirm transactions on the smart contract-based network when it becomes available early next year.
Great enthusiasm for the Casper mainnet
CasperLabs is among many little-known blockchain projects hoping to steal even a fragment of the decentralized finance (DeFi) scene of cryptocurrencies from Ethereum. Industry tracker DeFi Pulse now estimates that Ethereum's DeFi blockchain projects are blocking over $ 10,6 billion in value.
But with market leader DeFi grappling with high fees and long confirmation times - not to mention a long-promised but hardly guaranteed network upgrade - Casper's team is eager to prove that an emerging competitor can handle demand. of the booming sector.
The numbers in the CLX round are indicative of Casper's enthusiasm for the mainnet launch. Manohar said the fundraiser brought in $ 4 million more than originally anticipated.
All that money came from 55 "medium-sized checks," he said. According to Manohar, a year after the CasperLabs Series A sale raised $ 14,5 million, the new capital will feed Casper's 40 employees in final pre-launch development, according to Manohar. Twenty-nine of them are engineers. Money "has always flowed abundantly into engineering," he said.
Proceed with or without the consent of the public
Manohar has no plans to perform another private sale before the public offering "early in the first quarter" of 2021. And there is no need, he said. The main function of the sale, now completed, was to establish Casper's launch day validators.
Next year's public sale of CLX, which CasperLabs previously claimed would take the form of an "exchange validation offer" on Singapore's BitMax exchange, will also give the public (but not US investors) a chance for nodes. staging. But Casper will be ready to go even without public consent. "We will only make our first public sale when the network is already decentralized," he said.
