Venture Trotter Weekly Review: Week Ending June 9, 2023

Taiko Labs, a Type 1 zkEVM Rollup solution that scales the Ethereum blockchain (makes transactions faster with lower gas fees), raised $22M over two rounds. Sequoia China led the $10M round that closed in Q3 2022, and Generative Ventures led the more recent $12M round. The company also announced that their Alpha-3 testnet is live. Per Taiko’s blog, “Taiko’s goal is to scale Ethereum in a manner that emulates it as closely as possible – both technologically and ideologically… At Taiko, we strongly believe that the principles that made Ethereum the default settlement layer of the open web — decentralization, permissionless-ness, and security — must be upheld at all cost in Layer 2 solutions.”

Ruceto has produced investor reports on competitors to Taiko Labs that utilize Optimistic Rollup technology instead of Zero-Knowledge Rollup technology. To date, Ruceto published a deep dive on Arbitrum, and is days away from publishing our upcoming report on Optimism (sign up for a 7-day free trial to access our library, and cancel anytime). However, Ruceto will definitely publish investor reports on ZK-Rollup projects in the near future. In spite of the fact that Arbitrum and Optimism have the most vibrant ecosystems, Vitalik prefers ZK-Rollups as a long-term solution. Per Vitalik, “Type 1 ZK-EVMs are what we ultimately need make the Ethereum layer 1 itself more scalable.”

Lens Protocol, a decentralised social network ecosystem developed by Aave, raised $15M in a round led by IDEO CoLab Ventures. The protocol works as an open “social graph” that other applications can plug into. Per the company, “Since users own their data, they can bring it to any application built on top of Lens Protocol. As the true owners of their content, creators no longer need to worry about losing their content, audience, and livelihood based on the whims of an individual platform’s algorithms and policies. Additionally, each application using Lens Protocol benefits the whole ecosystem, turning the zero-sum game into a collaborative one.” IDEO CoLab Ventures said on their Twitter account, “It is more clear than ever that an open, interoperable, and decentralized social layer is needed to create a more creative, pluralistic, and human internet.”

This is a project that Ruceto will keep a very close eye on. Social media is an obvious and easy to understand use case for Web3 that could lead to mass adoption because users want ownership of their profiles and data. The fact that AI is going to further incentivize tech companies to monetize other people’s data makes this issue more pressing.

The full list of the institutional investments that Ruceto tracked last week is below. Links to the target company website, investment announcement, and token info are provided via hyperlinks on the Target Name, $ Raised, and Token columns respectively.