Crypto news: Ethereum receives new capital

Ethereum is now at the center of a new challenge: raising capital to make the crypto fast and flexible akin to Amazon Web Services.

To that end, the CEO and founder of EigenLabs, Sreeram Kannan, has secured a $50 million funding round to succeed in that endeavor.

Ethereum: “the crypto akin to AWS” challenge raises $50 million in capital

Apparently, the Ethereum network may soon offer services in the style of Amazon Web Services (AWS), and this is thanks to the intervention of startup EigenLabs.

Sreeram Kannan, founder and CEO of EigenLabs as well as an associate professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, has just raised $50 million in funding to succeed in the venture. 

Happy to announce that EigenLabs, the team behind the initial development of the EigenLayer protocol, has raised $50 million in a Series A round led by @blockchaincap pic.twitter.com/8tmvBkcttX

— EigenLayer (@eigenlayer) March 28, 2023

The funding was led by Blockchain Capital, followed by Coinbase Ventures, Polychain Capital, Electric Capital, Hack VC, Finality Capital Partners and other investors.

Kannan believes his company’s flagship product, EigenLayer, represents a potential solution to the blockchain infrastructure crisis.

Specifically, Kannan noted that the performance of Ethereum, a decentralized cloud computing network – in other words, not owned by a technology conglomerate – was inferior to the centralized server networks operated by the likes of Amazon and Google.

In particular, when Ethereum developers run their code on the blockchain, they cannot choose which servers, or Ethereum nodes, run their programs. This creates redundancy, as many servers process the same code.

Ethereum: EigenLayer as crypto’s solution to offer AWS-style services

According to Kannan, developers relying on EigenLayer will be able to choose which nodes execute which parts of an application’s code.

This capability will allow programmers to create a compute division of labor, a possibility that has long been available to developers who have been using AWS.

In this regard, Kennan said:

“Our focus will be exclusively on maximizing the surface of innovation, which is, What new things can you build? Which is going to onboard the next group of application builders, which then onboards the next group of users.”

Basically, what Kannan and his team are now doing with EigenLayer is building a “data availability layer” on top of their product. This would mean writing data faster to the Ethereum blockchain. 

The capital obtained will be used by the professor to develop the project, paying other employees and funding code reviews and more.

The price of ETH over the weekend and the trend change

Since the beginning of 2023, one trend has been to see a pump in the price of ETH (and also BTC) over the weekend. But over the past weekend this was not quite the case.

The likely motivation is the influence of traditional markets, since BTC and ETH are considered risk-on assets and therefore follow the trend of this asset class.

This means that BTC and ETH are not suffering, but they suffer in response when fears about traditional markets spread, which triggers a more or less large outflow from risk-on assets.

In any case, since traditional markets are closed on weekends, the trend shows that such flight occurs on weekdays, while on weekends crypto markets recover ground.

However, this trend did not occur over the past weekend. Indeed, ETH was worth $1,813 on Friday 24 March and fell as low as $1,718 on Sunday. Oddly enough, ETH’s price recovery then occurred in these early days of the week. Currently ETH is worth $1,793.