Blockchain developer Fluent Labs has raised $8 million in seed and seed extension rounds led by Polychain Capital to build out its Ethereum Layer 2 blended execution network.

Primitive, dao5, Symbolic Capital, Builder Capital, Nomad Capital and Public Works also participated. The rounds included notable angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasan, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Jason Yanowitz, Santiago Santos, Dingaling, Cristian Manea and Will Price. The $8 million figure represents Fluent Labs' total fundraising to date, though it declined to disclose a valuation.

The company intends to use the capital to grow its existing team of 17 core contributors — specifically on the engineering side — to support the Fluent ecosystem and deploy the necessary infrastructure for its testnet and beyond, Fluent's pseudonymous co-founder and CEO Dino told The Block.

Fluent Labs argues that current onchain execution environments are constrained by the virtual machines, programming languages and tooling they support — limiting what developers can build. Fluent's Ethereum Layer 2 aims to address this by "blending" WebAssembly (Wasm), Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) applications into a unified execution environment — enabling developers to create applications leveraging multiple blockchain ecosystems without compatibility concerns. Wasm is used by several blockchains, including Polkadot, Near Protocol and Cosmos.

While it hasn't decided which virtual machine to add next, as it depends on market demand and developer needs, Fluent's extensible design allows it to add any VM, according to Dino. "Fluent is creating an expressive playground for developers by blending the best features of EVM, SVM and Wasm into one chain," Dino said. "The best web2 apps use the different programming languages and programming tools for different tasks, and Fluent brings this paradigm to web3."

"Today's blockchain execution environments are constrained by the VMs they support and their limited functionalities," Polychain Capital General Partner Luke Pearson said. "Designed from the ground up to be maximally expressive, Fluent lets devs use the best tools for each task when building applications without worrying about compatibility."

Developers are already building a range of applications on Fluent, with over 60 projects being developed in its ecosystem, the firm claimed. This includes onchain quant protocol Thales, web3 Product Hunt-style platform Floodlight and Solidity-based DeFi projects incorporating Rust components to improve performance and efficiency.

For users, Fluent will allow access to applications from different virtual machine ecosystems in the same place without switching wallets. Fluent Labs also plans to parallelize the blended environment, enabling high-performance and low-cost app usage across all its supported VMs.

"What fundamentally transforms user experience is the enablement of true cross-VM composability," Dino explained. "Imagine a decentralized exchange, written in Solidity like Uniswap, that can support Solana SPL tokens, allowing users to swap ERC-20 tokens for SPL tokens. Or a user being able to do a flash loan requiring atomic composability between ERC-20s and SPL tokens. These two use cases, along with many others, can exist with blended execution."

Dino argued that when developers are provided with more expressive design space, they use it, and most often, the result is higher-quality apps and unique experiences that weren't previously possible. "So, how does this impact the end user? They simply get better, more innovative applications. Blended execution realizes the original web3 vision."

Asked about the prospect of a future where applications dominate the crypto landscape with the complexities of various blockchain protocols abstracted away from the user experience under the hood, the Fluent co-founder agreed.

"Absolutely. We aim to create an environment where blockchain's technical complexity becomes invisible to end-users," Dino said. "The ideal end state is a user experience so seamless that users simply interact with applications without considering the underlying blockchain infrastructure." 

Today's internet users don't think about TCP/IP or HTTP when browsing websites. Similarly, blockchain users should not focus on what VM an application is built on and how it's technically implemented, Dino noted.

"We're working to make onchain interactions as intuitive as using a smartphone app — where sophisticated technology allows users to enjoy the service," Dino added. "This means creating applications that feel familiar, responsive and frictionless, regardless of the complex cross-chain, cross-VM mechanics happening behind the scenes."

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