Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform and its mainnet will be launched on Polkadot later this year
Protocol implementation services provider, PureStake, announced yesterday that it had closed a successful strategic funding round. The round raised $6 million and was led by blockchain investment firm CoinFund with the participation of Coinbase Ventures, Binance Labs, ParaFi, IOSG Ventures, Fenbushi Capital and previous seed investors.
PureStake is developing the smart contract platform Moonbeam on the Polkadot network. Moonbeam is also Ethereum-compatible which means that existing decentralised app (dApp) frontends and smart contracts built with Solidity (the programming language used on Ethereum) can be easily deployed to Moonbeam without much adjustment.
CoinFund CEO, Jake Brukhman, commented, “We see enormous potential in the Polkadot space, and Moonbeam is setting the state of the art of Ethereum compatibility on Polkadot as well as developing a robust smart contracting facility in the new network. We are pleased to be able to support the Moonbeam team as they continue to make incredible technical progress in this space”.
Various blockchain venture capital firms including Signum Capital, Arrington XRP, Hashkey and Hypersphere Ventures also supported the funding round. The money raised will be used for expanding to the Asian markets, performing third-party security audits, hiring development resources and building more integrations and developer tools.
Moonbeam’s seed round came in September 2020 with the launch of its testnet and it has since grown into one of Polkadot’s most notable parachains. Balancer, SushiSwap, IDEX, Ocean Protocol, Linear Finance and Seascape are among the projects which have integrated with Moonbeam or have plans to do so in the future.
PureStake CEO and Moonbeam founder, Derek Yoo, added, “From the beginning, we have prioritised broad and strategic distribution when fundraising. The partnerships forged in this round—which include some of the most well-respected names in the industry—will provide us with the capital, guidance, and global traction we need to launch the Moonbeam network and establish it as a centre of DeFi, NFT and other activity on Polkadot”.
Like the Polkadot launch, the Moonbeam network launch will take a multi-phase approach. Following on from the deployment of the testnet parachain in September, the Moonriver network will be deployed on Kusama–Polkadot’s “canary network” –after which the Moonbeam network will be fully deployed on Polkadot. It is anticipated that Moonbeam will reach mainnet by the middle of 2021.