DeFi
Botanix Secures $8.5M Seed Round to Build Bitcoin-Native DeFi Ecosystem
Quick take:
- Botanix will use the funds to build Spiderchain, a native L2 primitive of Bitcoin with full EVM equivalence.
- Willem Schroé, co-founder of Botanix, estimates that his new BTC L2 can scale the Bitcoin ecosystem to eight billion users.
- The pre-seed round brings the total raised to $11.5 million following an unannounced $3 million pre-seed round completed last year, the Block reported.
Botanix Labs, a Bitcoin-based Web3 startup, has raised an $8.5 million seed round from Polychain Capital, Placeholder Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and ABCDE. The fundraising brings the total raised to $11.5 million following an unannounced $3 million pre-seed round completed last year.
Andrew Kang, Fiskantes, Dan Held, The Crypto Dog, Charlie Spears, Altcoin Sherpa, Dovey Wan, Jebus, Icebergy, Crypto ISO and Davis were among those who joined as angel investors.
Botanix said it will use the new capital to accelerate the development of Spiderchain, a Bitcoin-native Layer 2 primitive that leverages the Ethereum virtual machine to scale the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Commenting on the fundraising, Willem Schroé, co-founder of Botanix and Spiderchain inverter, said his team wanted to build “an infrastructure that supports a global financial system running on Bitcoin for the next 100 years.”
“Spiderchain can expand the Bitcoin ecosystem to eight billion users and unlock billions of capital that has remained unused for years. We are proud to have the support of so many industry veterans who share our vision of reshaping the way the world thinks about building on Bitcoin,” Schroé said in a statement.
The Botanix team describes Spiderchain as an infrastructure that secures Bitcoin base layer funds using a series of decentralized, random multi-signatures resembling a spider’s web.
According to Botanix, Spiderchain allows smart contracts and dApps to be copied and executed on Ethereum in minutes natively on Bitcoin. The infrastructure also allows users to withdraw from crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Binance and Kraken to a web3 wallet connected to an L2 like MetaMask without using wrapped assets or leaving the Bitcoin network, The Block reported.
Botanix claims to have already generated over 200,000 active addresses in the testnet, and facilitated 10,000 “experimental” token launches and dozens of decentralized applications ahead of Spiderchain’s highly anticipated mainnet launch, planned for the summer.
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