Ribbit Capital and Variant led a $27 million Series A funding round for Blockaid, a Web3 security business that powers companies like Metamask and Opensea.In addition, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Cyberstarts participated in the financing.The business, which has offices in New York and Tel Aviv, stated in an email release on Monday that it will utilize the funds to grow its staff, product, and customer base in order to handle the “never-ending” security problems facing the sector.
Blockaid provides an additional layer of protection that works with any blockchain network and can scan each transaction from a wallet, as well as communicate with smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps).The company says that in the last three months alone, it has scanned 450 million transactions, stopped 1.2 million malicious transactions, and protected $500 million in customer cash that otherwise may have been compromised.
The blockchain security company Certik reported that in Q3 2023, almost $700 million was lost in 184 incidents, which is more than the total amount lost in the first half of the year ($633 million). This underscores the magnitude of the difficulty in strengthening security for Web3 projects and services.