Coinbase Ventures joins with a follow-up round in Astar Network
Today, we are thrilled to announce Coinbase Ventures joins the Strategic round of Astar Network along with Binance Labs, Crypto.com Capital, Polychain, and Dr. Gavin Wood among other key firms that have already invested $22M.
Astar Network is a dApp Hub on Polkadot that supports Ethereum Virtual Machine and WebAssembly to unlock Web3 for Web2 developers. Astar Network is one of the top three projects to win a Polkadot Parachain slot last December and launched its mainnet on January 17th, after two and a half years of development. Astar has raised $33M to date with participation from Polychain, Binance Labs, Alameda Research, Huobi Ventures, OKX Ventures, Crypto.com Capital, Alchemy Ventures, Digital Finance Group, Scytale Ventures, Dr. Gavin Wood, and other industry-leading investors. Astar now enters into the next exciting phase of growth with this follow-up investment round from Coinbase Ventures.
Steady growth and expansion since the launch
Since the mainnet launch in January of this year, the TVL of Astar Network has been growing rapidly. As of February 23rd, Astar’s TVL exceeded $700M and recorded the highest TVL in the Polkadot ecosystem. On the same day, Astar owned 42.4% of the total TVL of all Polkadot parachains.
Projects and dApps on Astar Network have been steadily increasing as well. Arthswap, a one-stop DeFi on Astar Network has reached a $90M TVL making them the highest TVL DeFi in the Polkadot ecosystem. Be on the lookout for more projects launching soon, like Starlay, a 1st Astar native lending protocol. NFT movement on Astar is a must-watch as well. For more details on NFT on Astar, please refer to this article. To support promising projects in the Astar/Shiden ecosystem, we have also launched the Astar Incubation Program and $100M Astar Boost Program in February.
Since the launch, Astar has announced a number of integrations to support the Astar community and developers. Through the partnership with Celer cBridge, the Astar community can bridge their tokens from networks such as Ethereum, Polygon, and BNB Chain to Astar. The Network has also partnered with Subsquid, a GraphQL API service provider, to make on-chain data management easier for the developers. Many more integrations are planned in Q1 and beyond to expand the Astar ecosystem.
Next Steps
Astar has achieved huge growth as the whole ecosystem since its launch, but this is just the beginning. A number of projects are expected to be launched in a couple of months, with more integrations. The team strongly believes in the multichain future and Web3. Astar is going to be a multichain smart contract hub by connecting multiple L1 chains and supporting multiple smart contract virtual machines.
Check out our complete roadmap for 2022:
https://medium.com/astar-network/astar-roadmap-2022-5b49919187fc
About Astar
Astar Network is a dApp hub on Polkadot that supports Ethereum Virtual Machine and WebAssembly to unlock Web3 for Web2 developers. Astar aims to be a multi-chain smart contract platform that will support multiple blockchains and virtual machines, as Polkadot Relay Chain doesn’t natively support smart contracts. That’s why it’s important for the Polkadot ecosystem to have a parachain that enables EVM support for all developers who want to build in the Polkadot ecosystem. Astar is here to provide the most accessible solution for all developers by supporting EVM and making a parachain where EVM and WASM smart contracts can co-exist and communicate with each other.
