Stake Technologies Raises $10M Ahead of Polkadot and Kusama Auctions

Stake Technologies, the company behind Plasm Network and Shiden Network, two hubs for building inter-blockchain compatible smart contracts across Polkadot, Kusama and other protocols, said Friday it has raised $10 million in a round of funding led by Fenbushi Capital.

A long list of investors also participated in the fundraising round, including: Hypersphere Ventures, Gumi Cryptos, IOSG Ventures, TRG Capital Management, AU21 Capital, Digital Strategies, SNZ, Sub0 Capital, Altonomy, East Ventures and others. The round was also joined by some notable angel investors, including Nobuyuki Idei, ex-CEO and chairman of Sony.

Stake Technologies will use the funding in the parachain auctions that are scheduled to take place over the coming weeks to help win slots on both Polkadot and its more experimental cousin Kusama. (Plasm is built on Polkadot; Shiden on Kusama.)

Projects can pursue a direct sales approach, where tokens of the new network are sold in exchange for the native token of the respective parachain network, either DOT or KSM. Another strategy involves “crowd loans,” where token holders loan their DOT or KSM to be used as collateral for the parachain lease. 

Stake Technologies has adopted a crowd loan strategy for winning the Shiden parachain lease, giving KSM holders an incentive to contribute by offering SDN tokens as rewards. At the end of the lease period, which can range from six months to two years, the tokens are returned to their original holders. (On Kusama the lease period is capped to about 11 months.)

“Since meeting the Plasm team in 2019, when Stake Technologies was one of the very first teams building on Substrate in Longhash’s accelerator, we have been consistently impressed by the team’s ability to iterate and execute on their vision of bringing a scalable smart contract platform into the Polkadot ecosystem,” Remington Ong, a partner at Fenbushi Capital, said in a statement.

The Plasm and Shiden networks will bring a smart contract development layer to the Polkadot ecosystem that is interoperable with Ethereum and its various layer 2 scaling solutions, as well as other systems hosting apps like decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs). 

“The multi-blockchain approach means that Plasm and Shiden will be key contributions to the overall parachain ecosystem, with their work on scaling benefiting every other future parachain,” Jack Platts, a co-founder of Hypersphere Ventures, said in a statement.