According to the business on Tuesday, Puffer, a liquid stealth protocol, has raised $18 million in a Series A fundraising round.
Brevan Howard Digital and Electric Capital led the financing, and the business noted in a press statement that Coinbase Ventures, Kraken Ventures, Lemniscap, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, Mechanism, Lightspeed Faction, Consensys, Animoca, and GSR were among the investors.
The new funding round will support Puffer’s mainnet launch. Earlier, Puffer secured $5.5 million in a financing deal that Lightspeed Faction and Lemniscap jointly led.
Puffer belongs to a family of protocols that have emerged from the burgeoning “restaking” industry that has taken the Ethereum ecosystem by storm. It is the second-largest liquid restaking protocol, behind Ether.Fi. EigenLayer, a pioneer in restaking that debuted last week but lacked some of its much-anticipated features, has drawn in over $12.7 billion in user deposits to rank as the second-largest decentralised financial network, according to DeFiLlama.
Deposits made through liquid restaking protocols are placed in EigenLayer, where Ethereum stakers can earn interest by utilising their ETH tokens to support the security of third-party platforms referred to as “actively validated services” (AVS). On EigenLayer, Puffer is an AVS.
Following that, Puffer gives its users their own token, pufETH, which represents their deposit. Users are then free to use pufETH for trading or other uses.
Prior to the mainnet protocol being online, Puffer signalled excitement for restaking in March by surpassing $1 billion in deposits.
Amir Amir Forouzani, CEO of Puffer Finance, stated, “With our upcoming mainnet launch, we aim to significantly reduce barriers for home validators to participate, while delivering the most advanced liquid restaking protocol.” “This is a significant advancement for the decentralisation of Ethereum and the larger restaking ecosystem.”