Dear Community,
We are proud to announce that Particle Network has officially raised $25 million to continue to fund our chain abstraction vision. Previously, Spartan Group and Gumi Crypto led a $15 million round, with participation from SevenX Ventures, Morningstar Ventures, HashKey Capital, MH Ventures, UOB Venture Management, Flow Traders, and SNZ.
These investors join our OG backers including Animoca Ventures, LongHash Ventures and Alibaba Group, among others.
As you know, our goal has always been to make Web3 simpler, easier, and better for both developers and end users. That’s why we decided to solve the problem of user and liquidity fragmentation and work towards our vision: one account, one balance, any chain.
History and Fundraising
Since its founding in May 2022, Particle Network has gone through three eras:
Wallet Abstraction (WA): Particle’s original product featured an MPC-TSS embeddable wallet that users could generate via social login, enabling dApps to simplify the onboarding process for Web2 users. Our WA modular stack has grown to be compatible with over 60 different chains and has been integrated by over 900 dApps, protecting over $2 billion worth of user assets.
Account Abstraction (AA): With the debut of ERC-4337 Account Abstraction, we enhanced our product offering by integrating the comprehensive AA stack into the wallet abstraction, enabling developers to leverage AA alongside Particle’s existing solutions. With BTC Connect, we also introduced ERC-4337 AA infrastructure in the BTC ecosystem, establishing deep partnerships with Bitcoin L2 and wallets to use EVM-compatible networks with native Bitcoin signatures. This has helped us reach over 17 million users and process over 10 million AA transactions.
Chain Abstraction (ChA): As the next step in its evolution, we announced a modular L1 blockchain that serves as the central coordination mechanism for universal accounts. These accounts are Particle’s flagship innovation, enabling users to have a single account and balance that can be used across all chains, providing greater interoperability for the Web3 ecosystem. They are supported by two underlying features (Universal Liquidity and Universal Gas), which together enable users to use their tokens on any chain, paying for gas in any token. Crucially, all users leveraging the existing solutions above will be immediately upgraded to universal accounts, seamlessly bootstrapping the initial ecosystem and usage of L1.
Project Development
Particle Network currently has a globally distributed team of over 30 full-time employees, the majority of whom are developers. Through continued collaboration, we are helping to shape the chain abstraction landscape for Web3, unifying efforts to benefit our ecosystem, and raising awareness of the growing decentralization of Web3.
Additionally, since the initial release of our modular L1, we have established over 60 blockchain partnerships with initial support for Universal Accounts, including Berachain, Avalanche, Arbitrum, and zkSync. The initial implementation of Particle Network’s modular L1 and Universal Accounts will also be supported by a variety of partner technologies, such as Avail DA, Celestia, Hyperlane, and Babylon.
Future plans
The Particle Network mainnet is expected to be launched in the third quarter of 2024.
In the meantime, you can already test Particle's chain abstraction capabilities through our testing and community program Particle Pioneer. The testnet has seen widespread participation, registering over 114 million transactions and around 1.3 million general accounts. It also has the first working versions of general accounts and general gas, and will introduce general liquidity in testnet phase 2 in the coming days.
Chain abstraction has the potential to accelerate adoption and innovation in the Web3 space by creating a user experience that removes the manual processes required to interact across multiple chains. As Web3 reaches its first billion users, universal accounts have the potential to serve end users and developers in a rapidly expanding space.
Particle Network’s wallet abstraction solutions are completely free for developers and teams. By integrating these solutions, you can put your project on the path to leveraging chain abstraction.