Ethereum restaking protocol Eigenlayer built project Puffer Finance secured $18 million in a Series A funding round for launching its mainnet. According to the announcement dated April 16, the funding round was led by Brevan Howard Digital and Electric Capital, with significant investments from Coinbase Ventures, Kraken Ventures, Lemniscap, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, Mechanism, Lightspeed Faction, Consensys, Animoca, GSR, and other angel companies.
Notable Move from Puffer Finance
Blockchain data analysis platform DeFiLlama reports that shortly after its early test phase in February, Puffer Finance exceeded a total locked value of $1.2 billion. To date, the protocol has secured a total of $23.5 million in venture capital funding.
In its announcement, Puffer Finance highlighted technological advancements with the mainnet launch, revealing that following this round, Puffer received a strategic investment from Binance Labs, strengthening its position in the Liquid Restaking ecosystem.
Puffer Finance‘s technology allows Ethereum validators to reduce the capital required from individual stakers from 32 Ethereum to just 1 Ethereum. Additionally, users staking Ethereum through Puffer subsequently receive Puffer liquid restaking tokens (nLRTs), which can be used to earn yields in other decentralized finance protocols simultaneously with Ethereum staking rewards.
Staking Protocols and Blockchain Industry
The process known as liquid staking has been long implemented by other blockchain ecosystems like Cosmos, but it was only recently adopted by Ethereum following the Merge upgrade. Amir Forouzani, a main contributor at Puffer Labs, stated in a press release:
“While offering the most advanced restaking buying protocol, we aim to significantly reduce participation barriers for protocol validators.”
Recently, EigenLayer surpassed DeFi lending protocol Aave in total locked value (TVL) and temporarily removed the limit on how much users could stake, resulting in $10.4 billion worth of crypto assets being added to the protocol.
Dune Analytics data shows that EigenLayer has over 107,900 unique deposit holders, and DeFiLlama statistics indicate that 74% of the staked tokens are Wrapped Ether (wETH) and stETH. Liquid staking protocols are currently the largest DeFi protocol category with about $55 billion in locked value across approximately 160 protocols, primarily supported by Lido, the largest protocol with a locked value of $35 billion.
