Root Protocol – a company focused on building a portal to connect with any chain, DApp, and asset – announced it has closed $10 million in funding at a valuation of $100 million. Animoca Brands led the funding rounds. They included contributions from several other notable investors, including Shima Capital, DFG Group, Signum Capital, Ankr Network, Digital Strategies, CMS Holdings, Double Peak, GenBlock Capital, Cypher Capital, and Basics Capital. The new investors announced are Dao5 and Gate Labs Ventures.
The founding team members, collaborators, and advisors of Root Protocol are from Consensys, Bankless Ventures, Ontology, Polygon, CoinShares, Morgan Stanley, DCG, Stanford University, and MIT. They are a group of longtime crypto and Web3 builders. The highlighted advisors and angels include Meltem Demirors, Evin McMullen, Ben Lakoff, and Tekin Salimi.
Root Protocol’s funding comes as the market sees renewed interest in decentralized identity protocols, especially those that saw high growth during the bear market: Root Protocol’s B2C product, Isme.is, has nearly 500,000 unique and human-readable .isme (e.g. satoshi.isme) DID accounts claimed and over 250,000 verified (via social linkages) DID accounts active.
The funding round will help Root Protocol in its new and more comprehensive vision of building an operating system with the composition of an intent-centric aggregator of digital identity, social network, and more to enable unified access to Web3. And it consists of four main components, including the Root Operation Executor, Root Chain (Rollup), Root Account, and Root Indexer – all of which operate together to facilitate effortless interoperability, scalability, and composability. Plus, they believe that most of the complexities of any online experience that utilizes web3 technologies can be abstracted away at the user account level, where they can have a UI and UX that is tantamount to a Web3 back-ended, data sovereign and individual mission control type of setup.
KEY QUOTES:
“We are confident in the vision of data sovereign individuals and so are our great investors and collaborators. Just like the traditional banking model had been revolutionized by crypto, the dominant web2 platform model will be revolutionized by DIDs, blockchain technology, and users having data sovereignty and data leverage-ability, whether on-chain or off-chain. Thankfully, some of the key building blocks are now well in place for us to achieve this fully: Our new architecture built on the top of Layerzero (interoperability) and Celestia (Rollup & DA). Root Protocol is the root of Web3.”
– CEO and Co-Founder Dylan Dewdney
