Lava Network, a modular blockchain infrastructure developer, has raised $15 million in a seed funding round ahead of its mainnet launch.
Jump Capital, Hashkey Capital and Tribe Capital co-led the round, with participation from North Island Ventures, Dispersion Capital, Alliance DAO, Node Capital, Finality Capital Partners and others, Lava announced Thursday. Lava added that unidentified executives from Celestia, Cosmos, StarkWare, Filecoin, and other blockchain ecosystems also participated in the round.
Lava was founded in 2022. Company CEO Yair Cleper said the seed round closed in December of last year. He declined to comment on the structure or valuation of the round.
What is Lava Network?
Lava is a modular blockchain network focused on providing data access through remote procedure calls (RPC) and indexing. While Web3 requires application developers to make RPC requests to send and retrieve blockchain data, indexing helps retrieve specific data from the blockchain network.
“Developers use Lava to retrieve and send blockchain data ('access the blockchain'),” Kleper said. “New chains and APIs are added to Lava without permission. This means the network can dynamically and quickly support access to all web3.”
Lava is sometimes compared to the popular modular blockchain network Celestia, with the latter focused on data availability and the former focused on data access, Kleper said.
The Lava network is currently in testnet. Last month, we launched incentivized public RPC services on NEAR, Evmos, Axelar, and other blockchains, with plans to add more chains in the near future.
Blockchain node operators participate in Lava and are rewarded for providing high-performance RPCs. “Rewards are distributed based on quantity of service and quality of service: speed, uptime, and accuracy, optimizing performance for developers and users,” he said.
Lava aims to launch its mainnet in the first half of this year. Lava currently employs 26 people, 20 of whom are blockchain engineers, Klepper said, adding that the project is looking to hire more people.
In the future, Lava aims to introduce a modular approach to oracles, sequences, and other blockchain data infrastructure, serving as a “permissionless store of everything for any Web3 service.”
Lava reward points magma
Ahead of mainnet, Lava today introduced a rewards points program called Magma. Cleper said users can earn Magma points by switching their RPC connections to Lava. He declined to comment on whether Magma Points would be redeemable for Lava's own tokens in the future.
Points are becoming increasingly popular among crypto projects to reward loyal users. As The Block recently reported, the crypto project has awarded over 40 billion reward points to date.
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