Over the last decade, there has been a proliferation of new blockchains and onchain assets. This trend is just accelerating as our online world is increasingly built on blockchain rails. Today, creating new chains and tokens is cheaper, faster, and safer than ever. While this fragmentation of chains and assets has enabled diversity and scale in the blockchain ecosystem, it has also made development across it complex. A future of hundreds of chains – each with their own unique assets – requires trusted, developer-focused infrastructure that can unify global token markets.
Against this backdrop, we are very excited to announce our latest investment in Reservoir, a developer platform building token trading infrastructure for every chain. They are here to help wallets, apps, and chains build with tokens across the entire onchain economy.
Reservoir’s journey started with NFTs, during a manic 2021-2022 market. Early to this trend, they built a suite of APIs for developers to access NFT data and trading, unifying Ethereum into a global NFT market. These APIs became virtually ubiquitous across projects that touched NFTs including Magic Eden, Metamask, Coinbase, and beyond.
Since then, Reservoir has expanded their token trading infrastructure to support fungible token trading with Reservoir Swap and cross-chain interoperability with Relay, an instant bridge and transaction execution protocol. Relay is designed to make cross-chain transactions instant and cheap, making it ideal for cross-chain UX and price sensitive applications like payments, bridging, NFT minting, and gas abstraction.
Relay’s service is available via the Relay App, which is a truly buttery experience that we recommend trying! It is also available via API, where it has already been embedded across major crypto applications. Since its launch in February 2024, Relay has seen explosive growth, processing over $500 million in transaction volume in the last month alone.
Tokens are the fundamental building blocks of the crypto ecosystem. For crypto to reach its full potential, users and developers need tools to seamlessly interact with these assets across different chains. Reservoir is solving this problem by providing the infrastructure necessary to enable a truly open and fluid onchain economy.
We are particularly thrilled to continue supporting Peter, Jason, Michael, and the rest of the Reservoir team. After co-leading Reservoir’s pre-seed financing in 2021, we have had the privilege of seeing firsthand their ability to combine execution and a deep understanding of the space. They’ve continued to iterate rapidly and deliver solutions that developers and users love.
We are proud to be doubling down with this Series A financing, joined by our friends at Variant, Archetype, and Square Peg. With this capital, Reservoir will continue building the best token trading infrastructure and will also be hiring.
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