Layer N raises $5M from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund

NEW YORK, Sept. 13, 2023—Layer N, a novel blockchain designed for hyper-performant applications backed by Founders Fund, dao5, and Kraken Ventures, is officially coming out of stealth with experienced DeFi co-founders Dima Romanov, David Cao, and Sheheryar Parvaz.

Layer N is uniquely designed as an asynchronous execution layer with highly specialized compute environments. These environments offer hyper-performance and EVM composability under a shared liquidity and a shared communication layer, with the ultimate goal of Layer N becoming infrastructure optimized for financial applications and dedicated to onboarding institutional liquidity.

Dima Romanov, co-founder of Layer N, commented on the news: "We spent two years building, talking to users, engaging institutional firms, and experienced first-hand the many challenges that protocols faced. We designed a novel network to address those challenges and eliminate friction in performance and user experience, streamline institutional onboarding, and allow protocols to focus on what's most important to them, building a great product."

Layer N's fully modular architecture allows the network to be optimized along every single component of the stack making Layer N the top choice for companies building complex protocols and easing the transition for more traditional firms and institutions to enter the on-chain world.

Layer N will not only enable high-frequency applications but also highly intensive and complex computations and transactions that are currently impossible to deploy on existing blockchains.

"The first step towards a web2 to web3 transition is to solve the infrastructure scalability problem by enabling applications to run on truly fast and scalable blockchains. With Layer N, we can finally enable a whole new class of powerful applications", says David Cao, co-founder of Layer N.

The round was co-led by Founders Fund, and dao5, with participation from SALT, Kraken Ventures, Mirana Ventures, Amber Group, Spencer Noon, Karthik Raju, and more. This marks one of the first public investments in crypto by Founders Fund since Joey Krug joined the firm after leaving Pantera. The backing of the San Francisco-based venture capital firm, whose portfolio includes Lyft, Facebook, and AirBnB further supports that Layer N is a team aiming to bridge the gap with traditional finance.

Layer N has already secured major liquidity partners and is beginning its process of talking with early-stage teams and developers to grow its ecosystem ahead of its public release.