DeFi-Focused Protocol, Chia Network, Raises Another $5M in Funding Round

Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, is also the top dog at Chia Network and had earlier said that the idea is to go the IPO route and rely on VC funding before launching their token.

This recent funding round has attracted other prominent stakeholders in the crypto sector. These include IDEO, Collab Crypto, and Naval Ravikant, the latter being a returning investor to the Chia Network initiative. Following the progress made, investors expressed confidence that the project will now move to advance its course of disrupting the Ethereum DeFi market despite the odds being against them at the moment.

Slow Ventures’ Jill Carlson particularly highlighted that she is eager for Chia Network Mainnet launch, which might take place later in the year. She, however, noted a shift in interest by VC’s to DeFi but echoed that base protocols still have a long term value proposition:

“But we believe that much of the most exciting innovation is still occurring in new and soon-to-launch based protocols.”

Chia Network’s Cutting Edge in DeFi

With Ethereum’s scalability issues, base protocols looking to disrupt its market dominance cannot be ignored. Cohen noted that Chia’s protocol would offer a comparable DeFi functionality by next year.

The Chia protocol uses empty computer space slots, as opposed to a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus, which has proven to quite resource-intensive. In line with this, Cohen further said that interested chia community contributors could start building as they await the Mainnet release:

“We’ve now finished that format so if you generate plots today and put the resources into building those they will still work the day mainnet goes live.”

The Chia ecosystem will mainly focus on institutional clients, especially vertical vendors, in the financial services sector. Gene Hoffman, Chia’s Chairman, highlighted that they are already pursuing prospects not limited to government agencies and banks which might find value in their hybrid open-source model:

“[Banks] are concerned about having to route all their transactions through Manhattan. … They, too, understand they want the positives of an open network that can still use types of decentralized identity.”