PureStake, a company that builds blockchain infrastructure for proof-of-stake networks, has raised $6 million in a funding round led by investment firm CoinFund, and supported by Binance Labs, the incubation and seed funding arm of the world’s largest crypto exchange.
Coinbase Venture, ParaFi, Fenbushi Capital, IOSG Ventures, Divergence Ventures, Signum Capital and others also participated in the round.
The company said the funding will be used to launch the Moonbeam network later this year on mainnet, hire new staff, build developer tools, perform third-party security audits and expand its operations in Asia.
PureStake’s Moonbeam parachain launched its testnet in September 2020 as part of the Polkadot ecosystem. Since then, it has formed the foundation for many new projects that have have begun to build on its network or have planned integrations with it, such as SushiSwap, Balancer, IDEX and Ocean Protocol.
In an interview with CoinDesk, Austin Barack, senior investment analyst at CoinFund, praised what he called the Moonbeam network’s strong Ethereum compatibility.
“Applications that are built on Ethereum can be deployed in parallel onto Moonbeam without having to reconfigure their code, and from there they have interoperability into the entire Polkadot ecosystem where they can benefit from fast transaction times and low transaction costs, but also connectivity to all of the other applications built on Moonbeam and other parachains within the broader Polkadot network,” said Barack.