On August 14, Essential, an Ethereum Layer 2 project, announced that it had successfully raised $11 million in a Series A funding round led by Archetype Ventures.
The round also saw participation from IOSG Ventures, Spartan Group, Mirana Ventures, Amber Group, Maven 11, and Big Brain Holdings. Individual investors from projects such as Celestia, Hashflow, LI.FI, Sorella, and others also participated in the round.
The Series A round is structured as equity with token purchase rights. Essential plans to use the newly raised capital to launch new products and add potential staff to the project.
The Series A round also brings Essential’s total funding to date to $16.15 million. Previously, in September 2023, the project successfully raised $5.15 million in its seed round.
Project founder Liesl Eichholz said that Essential started the fundraising process in early 2024 and ended it in June. However, he declined to disclose Essential’s valuation after this round.
Essential is an Ethereum Layer 2 project using Optimistic Rollup technology. The project pursues an intent-centric model, meaning the system will analyze users’ wishes to come up with the best solution. The intent-centric model focuses on the “end goal” instead of focusing on the “how” like traditional transaction models. This novel approach helps Essential improve user experience, reduce on-chain workloads, and enhance scalability.
Recently, Essential also launched the Pint programming language to help developers create blockchain applications based on the intent-centric model.
The company has also launched a pre-alpha devnet version of the language for testing purposes. The Essential project is expected to launch a testnet by the end of 2024 and a mainnet in 2025.
It is worth noting that Essential has revealed that it will launch its own project token, so this could be a potential opportunity for airdrop hunters.
Once one of the hottest narratives of 2023, Ethereum Layer 2 projects have seen quite disappointing performance in 2024. Specifically, since the beginning of 2024, many top Layer 2 tokens have dropped sharply such as OP (down 63.12%), ARB (down 62.78%), and MATIC (down 56.59%).
In particular, the token that has disappointed many holders the most this year is STRK (StarkNet) when it has split 5 times since its listing on the exchange in February. Currently, STRK is trading around $0.4, down 82% compared to the price of $2 when it was first listed on Binance.
This indicates that token prices are influenced by factors such as tokenomics and community sentiment, not solely by the project’s technology.
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