Ethereum scaling solution Boba Networks shared Tuesday that it has raised $45 million from a bunch of investors including Crypto.com, Huobi and BitMart, among a couple dozen others. The Series A round values the project at $1.5 billion.
There are hundreds of billions of dollars tied up in the Ethereum blockchain, but while developers and security researchers have plenty of nice things to say about it, it’s no secret that the blockchain as built hasn’t exactly kept up with the times. This is part of the reason you read about layer 1 (L1) and layer 2 (L2) networks so often; VCs are making bets on competing L1 blockchains to take advantage of this deficit and L2 blockchains that sit on top of Ethereum are designed to improve the speed and price of transactions.
Boba is building out a so-called optimistic rollup L2, which essentially processes a number of transactions on the secondary chain while “optimistically” assuming that its outputted list of bundled transactions were all legitimate — while giving skeptical parties time to prove if any of those transactions were fraudulent and reverse them. It’s a technology that has been pretty widely accepted as a near-term solution for the Ethereum network and VCs have already christened a number of other unicorns in the optimistic rollup space including Optimism and Arbitrum.