Blocknative Raises $5 Million to Illuminate the Dark Forest

We are excited to announce that we have raised $5 million in new financing, bringing our total raised to $7 million. Our latest round of financing is led by Blockchain Capital and includes participation from new investors IDEO CoLab Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Industry Ventures as well as existing investor Foundry Group. 

Over 200 projects use Blocknative in production – including Curve, Synthetix, Zapper, Gnosis Safe, Authereum, Bancor, RelayPay, dHedge, Gilded, Fairmint, Grid+, Pillar, and more – to monitor their in-flight transactions, streamline their transaction user experience, and successfully navigate what is now commonly characterized as Ethereum's Dark Forest. Our customers and investors share our core belief that, in order for blockchain technology to fulfill its promise and have a truly global impact, crypto transactions must have the reliability, resiliency, and predictability of traditional financial transactions.

The problem: hidden transaction settlement risk

Today, the public blockchain transaction settlement process is frustratingly opaque. After submitting a transaction you wait, and (hopefully) it gets confirmed. Or it fails. Or it gets stuck. Or it just disappears. Why? Because your pending transaction is invisibly competing with tens of thousands of other pending transactions for limited block space. The stakes – and the risks – include the time to settle, transaction fees, the terms of settlement, and more.

You have next-to-zero visibility into this critical competition because it plays out in real-time and at a global scale, inside the thousands of unique nodes that comprise public blockchain networks. This lack of transparency surrounding in-flight transactions creates exploitable opportunities for well-informed, well-resourced, and very real adversarial actors:

• Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges
• Evidence of Mempool Manipulation on Black Thursday: Hammerbots, Mempool Compression, and Spontaneous Stuck Transactions
• Staring Into the Monster’s Eye: Analyzing a Generalized Front-running Arbitrage Bot Attack
• How to Munch on Pickles from a Whale Dinner

The root of these risks is the mempool, the pre-consensus layer for pending transactions.

Our solution: master the mempool

We are pioneers on the mempool frontier. Our first-of-its-kind global data platform captures thousands of mempool events every second, recording billions of rows of data each month across the Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains. We strive to provide unrivaled transaction settlement transparency — so that our customers can focus on delivering smooth and seamless transaction experiences. 

We have been building our portfolio of enterprise-grade solutions that provide builders and traders alike with end-to-end visibility into the entire blockchain transaction lifecycle. Our current offerings include:

• Blocknative API and SDK: Provides programmatic access to our global mempool data platform and enables fluid composability. 
• Mempool Explorer: The industry's first and only real-time authoring environment for mempool data streams.
• Notify.js: The fastest and easiest way to deploy live transaction notifications into front-end experiences. 
• Onboard.js: A best-in-class connect wallet button allowing builders to integrate with more than 20 different Ethereum web3 wallets, including hardware wallet support.  

Our solutions have been deployed by hundreds of DeFi protocols and traders into production. If you are a builder or a trader, we invite you to go hands-on today.

Looking ahead: join our movement

We are working towards a future in which a crypto-native global population can transact with clarity and confidence.

We have an ambitious product roadmap designed to accelerate the arrival of this blockchain-based future, and accordingly we are now growing our engineering, design, and go-to-market teams. Please visit the Blocknative Career Hub if you are interested in joining the movement to illuminate the Dark Forest and level the playing field for the next generation of builders and traders. 

Finally, we are excited to welcome Blockchain Capital partner Spencer Bogart to our Board of Directors as well as DeFi pioneer Mariano Conti and experienced crypto design leader Zach Krasner to our Board of Advisors. Alongside our financing, we also have a new website that includes updates to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.