A16z Leads $6M Seed Funding Round in Blockchain Linera

Linera, a layer 1 blockchain project intended to bring Web2 scalability to Web3 has completed a $6 million seed funding round led by Marc Andreessen's Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

Cygni Capital, Kima Ventures and Tribe Capital also participated in the round, Linera said in a statement on Tuesday.

Linera founder and CEO Mathieu Baudet has a PhD in cryptographic protocols and is a former Meta (FB) employee who helped create Facebook’s Libra blockchain.

The Linera chain aims to be low latency.

“If you interact with traditional exchanges, or you’re used to insanely fast interactions, we’d love to get closer to those kind of numbers,” Baudet told CoinDesk. “The actions are rewarded like near-real time very quickly by the standard centralized system.”

Another feature of Linera is linear scalability, a system from Web2 where additional processing units are added as needed. In the case of Linera, this consists of shards, or individual threads, of the chain adding additional validators for network efficiency.

Sharding is a technique that aims to fulfill the three tenets of a blockchain network: scalability, security and decentralization. It has been a significant component of the Ethereum merge, with the goal of scaling the network by segmenting it into smaller chains.

Baudet said Linera plans to use the funding to hire engineers and team members to build out the protocol. He did not disclose when the network will launch its open-source protocol.

Read More: Valid Points: The Risks and Rewards of Sharding