Layer3 Raises $15M Series A Co-Led by ParaFi & Greenfield One

Jun 12, 2024

by Layer3 Team

Layer3 is excited to announce a $15 million Series A funding round co-led by ParaFi & Greenfield Capital. The round also saw participation from Electric Capital, King River, Immutable, Lattice, Tioga, LeadBlock Bitpanda Ventures, Amber, Stateless, & GD1.

We also raised a previously unannounced strategic round of $3.7M in 2022 from Electric, Lattice, ThirdPrime, ParaFi, and Sandeep Nailwal, and a $2.5M round in 2021, bringing total funds raised to $21.2M.

Layer3 solves the dual problem of attention and distribution in crypto: attention, the currency of the internet, is monopolized by centralized tech behemoths who profit at the expense of users; meanwhile, the crypto protocols challenging this system face a major distribution hurdle with getting their product in front of users and rewarding those users with tokens. 

Unified interface for onchain identity and incentives

Layer3’s omnichain identity and distribution protocol creates an unrivaled flywheel effect, where crypto consumers discover new projects, and projects reward their onchain activity. By aggregating user activity across multiple chains and dApps, Layer3 generates a unified view of a user’s onchain identity and enables highly targeted, efficient distribution of tokens.

Projects building on Layer3 can programmatically route tokens to the right users at the right time based on a variety of criteria like temporal triggers, asset ownership, onchain activity, credentials, social graph, and quest engagement. 

Attention is perhaps the scarcest resource in the on-chain economy,” says Ben Forman, Founder of ParaFi. “How do you attract and retain users as a web3 project in a sustainable and organic manner?  In today's on-chain environment, the lion's share of networks and dApps are plagued with ephemeral user bases and negative unit economics. Layer3 aims to solve this problem by building a super-aggregator for the on-chain economy. Simply put, they are critical middleware for users to navigate on-chain experiences.

Uniswap, Base, Arbitrum, Linea, Polygon, Gnosis, Celo, and more than a hundred other crypto teams are using Layer3’s distribution infrastructure. The platform has served over 3 million unique users in 120 countries to date and Layer3’s distribution protocol supports 25 different blockchains across the EVM and Solana ecosystem. 

We believe everything will have a token, and there will be myriad ways for users to earn them. Tokens make it exponentially easier for projects to reach and retain users and reward engagement. But so far in crypto, tokens have been inefficient and costly for the projects that launch them.

Layer3 is the catalyst for a new era of user-owned value. In crypto, attention is action, and we aim to decentralize this new attention economy by making it 10-100x easier to reach users. Our vision unlocks the same market that created trillion-dollar internet behemoths—but on a network where the value generated from attention and engagement accrues directly to the users.

Layer3 is poised to revolutionize onchain value distribution by addressing critical challenges for both users and leading Web3 projects,” says Claude Donzé, Principal at Greenfield Capital. “For users, Layer3 offers a trusted, guided exploration of Web3 by rewarding them for meaningful engagement. For networks, protocols, and dApps, Layer3 provides a powerful solution to attract and retain the right users through targeted token distribution.

Layer3 makes tokens much more efficient

Our interface is tailored to provide users with an engaging experience. For each project undertaken, users earn a CUBE (Credential to Unify Blockchain Events), which serves as a record of their activity across various fragmented chains via public key. CUBEs can be considered as on-chain session data owned by the user. More than 10 million CUBEs have been minted on Layer3 in just the four months since its launch. 

Later this year, the Layer3 Foundation will launch the L3 token, along with a new AI-enabled protocol for optimizing distribution strategies.