Crypto staking services provider Figment has raised $50 million in a new funding round it plans to utilize for hiring and business expansion.
The Series B round announced Monday was led by Senator Investment Group and Liberty City Ventures, with participation from Anchorage Digital, Declaration Partners, Bonfire Ventures and Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital.
According to Figment, this latest round will help to support the adoption and growth of its place in the Web 3 ecosystem. It stakes yield-generating assets on behalf of more than 100 institutions, and this year reached over $7 billion in digital assets staked to its infrastructure.
Crypto staking is the process of locking up crypto holdings in order to obtain rewards or earn interest. Everyday cryptocurrencies are built with blockchain technology, in which crypto transactions are verified, and the resulting data is stored on the blockchain. Staking is another way to describe validating those transactions.
Depending on the types of cryptocurrency you’re working with and its supporting technologies, these validation processes are called “proof-of-stake” or “proof-of-work.” In Figment’s case, the firm works in the POS space. Each of these processes help crypto networks achieve consensus or confirmation that all of the transaction data adds up to what it should.
However, achieving that consensus requires participants. That’s where staking come in — investors who actively hold onto, or lock up their crypto holdings in their digital wallet are participating in these networks’ consensus-taking processes. In other words, Stakers are essentially approving and verifying transactions on the blockchain.
“This funding round marks the start of a new chapter at Figment that aligns with the evolution of the industry. PoS has gone from proof of concept to mainstream and is being adopted by investors and developers at a massive scale,” said Lorien Gabel, Figment CEO in a statement.
Figment currently supports more than 30 proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains, including Ethereum 2.0, Solana, Polkadot, NEAR, and Avalanche.
Just a month ago, the crypto staking firm joined The Graph ecosystem as a core protocol developer alongside Edge & Node and StreamingFast to beef up the decentralized indexing layer for Web 3. At the time, Gabel noted Gabel that Figment will bring more developer tools like The Graph to market with the fresh funding in place.
Overall, Figment’s latest round brings the firm up to $55 million in funding to date. According to Bloomberg sources, this values the company at around $500 million.