web3mine – an open-source innovation lab building Web3 tools that help humanity transition to community-owned and -governed internet infrastructure – recently announced its emergence from stealth mode following a successful $6 million seed funding round. This funding round was led by 1kx, a leading Web3 investor who included Protocol Labs and a community of angel investors.
web3mine aims to empower people to collectively coordinate capital and hardware to build an open, performant, and resilient computing infrastructure for everyone. As a graduate of Alliance DAO’s prestigious demo day and accelerator, web3mine seeks to eliminate common Web2 pain points like location-referenced data, siloed cloud-specific tooling, vendor lock-in, complex legal structures – which often results in the concentration of market power in a few large corporations.
To make this happen, web3mine is building the world’s largest open-access compute network to democratize creating and capturing value on new or established decentralized networks.
Over the past year, web3mine has made substantial progress in building two key offerings.
1.) Hardware monetization – Hardware owners can easily and efficiently deploy and monetize their assets and the utility that they provide (e.g., hard drives for storage, circuits for computational workloads, and networking equipment to move data) by completing jobs.
2.) Liquid staking – Cryptocurrency holders can deploy their tokens to aid the growth of the decentralized networks and, in return, participate in the value they create by collecting staking rewards.
The initial offerings help simplify, optimize, and open access to the process of mining FIL (the native token of the Filecoin network). And by utilizing technology developed by web3mine and capital provided by stakers, hardware operators are able to scale their operations efficiently, drive substantial cost savings and reduce their exposure to the volatility of cryptocurrencies. web3mine passes the cost savings to its stakers thereby allowing them to benefit from the growth of these network economies at an estimated annual percentage yield of up to 25%.
Thousands of machines are connected to web3mine’s network already. And together, these machines provide petabytes of necessary storage capacity and complete tens of thousands of computing jobs daily.
KEY QUOTES:
“Time and time again we have seen how the Web2 model for storage and compute poses massive challenges: Cloud providers lock users’ data, are slow to innovate, and command sky high prices and governments across the globe come to have power over citizens far outside their jurisdictions. By providing common infrastructure for storage, compute, and liquidity providers, we’re driving the next iteration of the cloud. web3mine is building new technological primitives and new incentive structures powered by crypto networks. These will enable humanity to collectively gather and coordinate resources to solve the world’s hardest problems.”
- Vukašin Vukoje, founder of web3mine
“web3mine is not only building a critical coordination layer between capital providers and hardware operators for various networks but also serving one of crypto’s most important use cases in liquid staking. Creating a liquid staking layer for infrastructure networks has vastly different challenges than building a Layer 1 liquid staking layer and web3mine is uniquely qualified to address all of them. We are excited to see web3mine’s first product go live for the Filecoin ecosystem and look forward to its expansion into established and emerging decentralized networks.”
- Michael Hua, Research Analyst at 1kx
“web3mine has built some of the most important tooling for the Filecoin network. Their innovations continue to ensure that cloud infrastructure such as Filecoin’s storage network benefit everyone rather than a select few organizations. Protocol Labs was founded with the aim of supporting projects across the entire Web3 ecosystem that will help radically improve the internet. We are proud to be working with web3mine as they drive the next iteration of the cloud, pushing open-source decentralized infrastructure and protocols to the world.”
- Brad Holden, Investments Lead at PL Ventures
