Blockchain Infrastructure Company Skip Raises $6.5 Million
- Skip Protocol recently announced that it raised $6.5 million. These are the details.
Skip Protocol recently announced that it raised $6.5 million.
Funding round: Seed
Funding amount: 6.5 million dollars
Investors: The round was led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from investors including Jump Crypto, Galaxy, Robot Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, IEX Group, Informal Systems, Sommelier Co-founder Zaki Manian, Celestia Chief Operating Officer Nick White, and JUNO Co-founder Jake Hartnell, among others.
What Skip does: Launched in 2022 by experienced software developers Barry Plunkett and Maghnus Mareneck, Skip’s platform allows users and traders to pay for transaction prioritization and privacy in a closed-bid auction with the goal of democratizing access to MEV opportunities and profits. And Skip’s infrastructure is designed to distribute MEV profits to validators, stakers and protocols, while making it easier for traders to execute their strategies. In addition, it also protects users from gas wars, transaction spam, front-running and sandwich attacks, and other drawbacks of toxic MEV mining.
What the money will be used for: The funding will be used to support the development of an innovative platform to bring the multi-billion dollar market for transaction prioritization, reordering and bundling (commonly known as “Miner Extractable Value” or “MEV”) to the Cosmos blockchain ecosystem and other rapidly emerging proof-of-stake ecosystems.
KEY QUOTES:
“Interoperable and sovereign blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem are driving some of the most exciting innovations in DeFi. But the presence of toxic forms of MEV, including spam and latency wars, has limited the financial upside and hurt the user experience of those who build and invest in them.” Skip’s goal is to provide chains and their communities with a toolset that allows them to decide how MEV is mined and where the profit originates. We are excited to leverage our infrastructure to help users, validators, stakers, relayers and others capture the value that they contribute to create and achieve economic sustainability.”
— Barry Plunkett, co-founder and CEO of Skip
“The long-term growth of app chains and L1s in the Cosmos ecosystem is dependent on the rewards the chains can provide participants sustainably, and Skip’s chain-specific, user-centric approach and infrastructure will help them deliver significant monetary value and optimized efficiency to the network. We are excited to drive the growth of such an important ecosystem as Cosmos and thank our dedicated investors, enthusiastic validation partners and welcoming ecosystem partners for their support.”
— Maghnus Mareneck, co-founder and managing director of Skip
“To mitigate exploits, protect users, and accelerate critical actions, every decentralized network must thoughtfully craft how it prioritizes transactions. Skip is building critical infrastructure to implement these capabilities. Barry and Mag are building Skip with the benefit of years of technical experience at DE Shaw and Atlassian developing software, financial markets and web3 native products Working closely with them from the start, we could not be more impressed and confident in their technical execution, user-centric values and clear vision for how networks will evolve in the decades to come is coming – a view clearly shared by the compelling community of protocols, validators, stakers, traders and others coming together in this funding to support Skip’s development.”
— Kevin Zhang, venture partner with Bain Capital Crypto
“The Cosmos ecosystem is currently exploring a new part of the design space of decentralized protocols via application-specific blockchains – and Skip greatly expands the value and type of MEV in the market. The Skip team has a very unique background that combines academic mechanism design research and practical software engineering that allows them to improve efficiency to the Cosmos ecosystem in the same way that MEV auctions enhanced Ethereum.
— Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures
