The blockchain infrastructure project Espresso Systems has raised $28 million in a Series B funding round led by investment giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
Espresso aims to increase interoperability between Ethereum (ETH) rollups by building a marketplace where rollups can sell the right to build their blocks to bidders.
Rollups are solutions that execute transactions outside of Ethereum’s blockchain but record the transactional data.
Espresso notes that Polygon, Taiko, o1Labs, StarkWare, Offchain Labs and strategic investors from more than 30 ecosystem projects joined their recent Series B round. The project had already raised $32 million between a seed round in 2020 and an Early Stage VC round in 2022.
Says the company,
“This additional funding will help us continue product development, meaningfully invest in the broader rollup ecosystem, and set the stage for the community to ultimately operate and govern Espresso as a fully decentralized, credibly neutral public good for all L2s [layer 2s], from based rollups to validiums. We’ll be hiring aggressively to build out our team and expand our efforts.”
The two primary types of rollups are optimistic and ZK. Optimistic rollups automatically assume transactions are valid, while ZK rollups run computations off the chain and then submit a validity report.
Espresso notes that their marketplace enables proposers to bid on multiple rollup blocks to become shared proposers for multiple chains at the same time, facilitating cross-chain activity.
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