Blockchain startup attracts major investment abroad
International investors are eyeing newly established tech companies in the field of cryptocurrencies and the development of blockchain infrastructure (Web3 infrastructure), some of which belong to Greek founders and are gaining a presence in Greece.
One of them is Mysten Labs, created of five former heads of the crypto and blockchain department of Facebook (Novi), a group that is building its own blockchain technology, known as Sui, from scratch, as well as its eponymous digital currency.
A few days ago, the company raised the unprecedented amount of $300 million from major international investors (among them FTX Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures etc) in a capitalization that exceeded $2 billion.
The firm’s asset is it has built a new blockchain that enables transactions to take place in less than a second. It is also developing a digital currency able to compete with existing ones, aspiring to create a more modern and secure version of Ethereum.
Silicon Valley-based Mysten Labs was founded just a year ago, and, according to its representatives, it has started hiring people in Athens and Thessaloniki. Kostas Chalkias, who together with George Danezis represents the Greek element of the team, had revealed in a recent interview with Kathimerini that the startup decided to come to Greece and hire a team of 15 engineers.
Explaining the object of Mysten Labs, Chalkias stated that “it is a decentralized database, which will not be controlled by only one organization, but by many entities. One will be able, for example, through one’s own account and one’s own digital signature to carry out all transactions, to upload contracts which cannot be modified, to create one’s own applications, without having to build one’s own database with its own developers.”
CEO Evan Cheng said the capital raised will help the company develop Sui’s blockchain technology, hire workers and expand in the Asia-Pacific region.
A much smaller amount, of the order of $2.5 million, has been raised by Rated Labs, founded last April by Elias Simos and Aris Koliopoulos with the aim of providing better transparency and rich context in Web3 infrastructure data.
