Coinspeaker
Meta Alumni Seeking $200M Investment for New Crypto Startup Mysten

Four alumni of American multinational tech giant Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ: META) are seeking a $200 million investment from investors for their new blockchain startup Mysten. As reported by The Information, should the projected capital be raised, Mysten will hit a valuation of $2 billion, bringing it to par amongst crypto unicorns even before its first proven products are available for public use.

According to the report citing two people familiar with the transactions, the startup has already raised $140 million, and the Series B round is being led by FTX Ventures. The report noted that the projected valuation of $2 billion could change “depending on whether equity investors receive additional warrants giving them the right to buy tokens that would work with its blockchains, as well as the strike price to exercise those options, one of the people cautioned.”

Mysten pulled $36 million in a Series A funding round back in December, a capital raise that was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) at the time. While the Series A valuation was unknown, achieving the $2 billion feat will come off as an ambitious push that is only peculiar to a limited number of protocols.

Unique Thing about Mysten from the Meta Alumni

Alongside Chief Executive Officer Evan Cheng, Mysten has been co-founded by Sam Blackshear, Adeniyi Abiodun, and George Danezis, all of whom have deep experience working at Novi Research. Cheng led Novi Research while at Meta and alongside the other co-founders, to develop the Diem blockchain and Move programming language, as well as enable breakthroughs in blockchain scalability, usability, and security.

They have brought the broad experiences they gained to develop the Mysten blockchain which is designed to solve the challenges of speed and scalability that current Layer-1 and Layer-2 protocols suffer. In a blog post describing the reasons why it invested in Mysten, Andreessen Horowitz said the startup is developing what will drive the mass adoption of Web3.0 by innovators and developers in Web2.

“Mysten is building foundational infrastructure for web3 to tackle these challenges and accelerate development and adoption of decentralized services,” the a16z blog post from Arianna Simpson reads “There’s significant demand for more efficient and safe smart contract developer tooling, and Mysten has the technology and expertise to make major improvements across multiple chains. Allowing developers to focus on perfecting their user experience, without tackling the complexities of lower-level blockchain integrations, is key to enticing more web2 talent to start building web3 applications.”

The Mysten blockchain is emerging in two distinct modes, including permitting integrations with existing networks, and open protocols based on Mysten-designed components.

Securing funding at a time when the industry is experiencing a broad-based consolidation in combined valuation is no small feat. It only signifies how Mysten has branded itself as a formidable infrastructure for the emerging metaverse world.

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Meta Alumni Seeking $200M Investment for New Crypto Startup Mysten