Andreessen Invests $100 Million in Crypto Startup EigenLayer
- VC firm was the sole investor in EigenLayer’s funding round
- Crypto venture investments declined sharply in the past year
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Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz invested $100 million in crypto startup EigenLayer, suggesting that some of the industry’s top backers are still betting on blockchain despite a steep downturn in crypto venture funding.
EigenLayer was founded by Sreeram Kannan, who previously was an associate professor at the University of Washington. The startup facilitates a process called “restaking” that has gained major traction in recent months and is a takeoff on the method that runs Ethereum, where tokens are deposited or “staked” to the network to help validate transactions on the blockchain. Restaking allows new projects building on top of Ethereum to lever the blockchain’s security for their own networks.