Blockchain startup CasperLabs, an off-shoot of leading smart contract platform Ethereum has raised $14.5 million in its Series A funding round led by the “Zelig of Wall Street” financier Terren Peizer through his personal holding company Acuitas Group Holdings.
In addition, the funding round saw several other notable investors contribute to the successful conclusion of the fundraiser. These are Arrington XRP Capital, Axiom Holdings Group, Digital Strategies, Consensus Capital, MW Partners, Blockchange Ventures, Hashkey Capital, and Distributed Global.
“We’re very proud to announce our $14.5 million Series A round to build the #blockchain platform purpose-built to scale sustainable opportunities for everyone,” CasperLabs announced on Twitter on Tuesday.
CasperLabs is aiming to solve scalability problems on its bigger brother blockchain Ethereum by solving the infamous trilemma problem of scalability, security and decentralization using the Correct by Construction (CBC) Proof of Stake consensus mechanism proposed by Ethereum Foundation researcher Vlad Zamfir.
In fact, the company was able to recruit Zamfir to join the technical team as the Lead CBC Casper Architect. Zamfir has made some highly controversial statements about Ethereum in the past in regards to its scalability and security.
In March of 2017, he made the comments that the project was immature, unsafe and unscalable at its then conditions. He then urged the community not to rely on it to create critical applications.
His innovation as a researcher for the Ethereum Foundation is perhaps his answer to Ethereum’s problems or at least a start. Joining CasperLabs was his way of focusing on developing his creation and seeing it come to fruition.
The company is now seeking to employ more engineers to the team to help create the next scalable Ethereum 2.0. According to the startup cofounder and CEO Medha Parlikar, they will be hiring between 10 and 15 people over the coming six or so months to join its team of engineers, architects, and academics.
“We will be investing in our core technical team, as well as important initiatives including ecosystem support, usability and experience, and more,” she said.
“We look forward to delivering several interesting technical updates in the coming months and welcome any and all feedback via our open source code repository on Github,” Parlikar added in a statement.
Piezer was particularly enthusiastic about his investment saying that:
“I’ve been following and studying the crypto and blockchain space since its earliest days, and I’ve been waiting for a company that can build the strength and decentralized aspects of a public chain with the speed, security, and scalability of a next-gen platform… Scalability of a product and company is the leading driver of value creation. Consistently, the most proficiently scalable company becomes the industry leader.”
Ethereum is preparing to migrate from its current consensus mechanism of Proof of Work to a staking mechanism called Proof of Stake, the same that CasperLabs is building upon. It seems very possible that if the startup builds a successful product, Ethereum engineers will adopt its solution.
