Symbiotic, which started as a restaking protocol and is now expanding into "universal staking," has raised $29 million in a Series A funding round to scale that vision.
Pantera Capital led the round, with Coinbase Ventures and over 100 angel investors from teams like Aave, Polygon and StarkWare participating, Symbiotic said Wednesday. Some of those angel investors include Stani Kulechov, Sandeep Nailwal, Anton Bukov, Anurag Arjun, Andrew Huang and Eric Wall, Symbiotic co-founder Misha Putiatin told The Block.
The round was closed earlier this month and is structured as equity with token warrants, Putiatin said. He declined to disclose Symbiotic's post-money valuation.
The Series A brings Symbiotic's total funding to $34.8 million. Last June, it raised $5.8 million in a seed round co-led by Paradigm and cyber•Fund.
Symbiotic began as a restaking protocol on Ethereum — a direct competitor to EigenLayer — but has since broadened its scope. It now describes itself as a "universal staking" protocol, designed to be modular and flexible enough to work across all kinds of networks, from Layer 1s to Layer 2s, monolithic to modular chains.
"Universal Staking builds on the capital efficiency introduced by restaking but dramatically expands its scope," Symbiotic said. "Rather than focusing solely on shared security, Symbiotic enables any combination of assets to secure any class of network — modular or monolithic, L1 or L2 — while supporting use cases that extend well beyond traditional staking, including insurance and other financial products."
In simple terms, Symbiotic wants to make it easy for any blockchain to secure itself using a variety of assets — not just the native token. And beyond staking, it sees potential in powering use cases that rely on strong economic guarantees, such as insurance and decentralized finance products.
Symbiotic said its universal staking protocol is already live with 14 networks and plans to expand to more than 35, including Hyperlane, Spark and Avail. Hyperlane — an interoperability protocol that helps blockchains communicate — is integrating Symbiotic to add native staking for its token. This will allow Hyperlane's messaging system to be secured by a decentralized validator set, improving trust and resilience, according to Symbiotic.
Putiatin said Symbiotic's current focus is on delivering plug-and-play staking systems for Layer 1s, oracles, bridges, data availability layers and artificial intelligence/ zero knowledge (AI/ZK) co-processors — areas where teams can lack the time or resources to build security infrastructure from scratch.
Symbiotic currently has around 30 employees and is hiring across engineering, protocol design and ecosystem roles to support upcoming launches and integrations, Putiatin said.
"As the number and variety of onchain assets continue to increase, Symbiotic allows them to easily serve as economic security while enabling entirely new use cases across DeFi," Paul Veradittakit, managing partner at Pantera Capital, said in a statement.
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