Flashbots, the Cayman Island-based provider of software used to package Ethereum blockchain transactions, has raised $60 million in a Series B funding round at a valuation of $1 billion. The company says that it will channel the funds towards its SUAVE network, which is an Ethereum-based research and development project geared towards eliminating the negative effects of Maximum Extractable Value (MEV).
A “beauty contest for decentralisation” was held to identify investors to provide the funding, and participants were judged on the quality of their “reverse pitches.” Paradigm, based in San Francisco, led the investment, bucking the current trend of Silicon Valley VCs to switch their focus to AI startups from cryptocurrency. However, there was no mention of other investors.
As a company, Flashbots develops software to tackle the negative effects of MEV. The term MEV describes the potential gain that network operators may realise from foreseeing and rearranging future blockchain transactions. This effort to mitigate MEV’s negative consequences is a game-changer for the betterment of Ethereum’s and the blockchain industry as a whole.
Flashbot says it will channel the proceeds from the latest funding round to further build the SUAVE (Single Unified Auction for Value Expression) platform, which it has been working on for some time. SUAVE is a distributed network capable of processing transactions and creating blocks independently of any central authority.
The main motivation behind the creation of the SUAVE platform was to provide a means for users to conduct transactions in a manner that is both confidential and inexpensive. Flashbots is confident that by making Maximal Extractable Value more open and decentralised, they could reduce the risks that come along with it.
Using SUAVE, developers can release intra-block applications like block builders and orderflow auctions. As a result, users can have their preferences executed by competing applications, resulting in more private and cost-effective transactions than are possible with current blockchains like Ethereum.
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