Llama – an access control and governance platform for smart contracts – recently announced it raised a $6 million seed round from Founders Fund and Electric Capital. Other notable investors include Elad Gil (early investor in Stripe, Airbnb, Figma), Sandeep Nailwal (Co-founder of Polygon), Stani Kulechov (Founder of Aave), Will Gaybrick (President of Product at Stripe), Amplify Partners, and FJ Labs.
Smart contract applications have accrued billions of dollars in value locked and treasury holdings. But securing and governing these protocols is still complex. And Llama launched a full-stack platform that makes access control and governance more effective and secure.
This enables protocols to encode roles, permissions, and execution strategies to define workflows to take onchain actions. And the actions could include upgrading a protocol, transferring funds, updating a registry, changing protocol parameters, or activating an emergency pause.
Llama’s co-founders Shreyas Hariharan and Austin Green started their journey by contributing to protocols and communities. And Llama has previously contributed to the largest organizations in crypto: Aave, Nouns, Lido, dYdX, and ApeCoin.
Llama was designed for role-based governance. For example, a risk service provider could be given permission to update risk parameters – subject to a delay period that allows the action to be vetoed by token holders. And similarly, an operations team could initiate an emergency pause that is executed immediately once a high approval threshold is met.
Llama is currently onboarding customers – who are looking for an onchain access control and governance solution.
KEY QUOTES:
“To scale our impact, we used our learnings to build the product we wish we had. In Llama, decentralization is achieved through access control. Each governance participant is granted the minimum amount of power to perform the function they are best suited to do.”
- Llama co-founder Shreyas Hariharan
Green added, “Today, protocols are wasting precious engineering resources forking open-source frameworks and hacking together custom front-ends. They understand the benefit of a vertically integrated solution.”
- Llama co-founder Austin Green
