Blocknative raises $15m to scale its block building infrastructure

Blocknative has announced that it earned $15.0 million in Series A-1 to fund its initiative to drive the company’s leadership in the emerging block building market.

The funding round for this real-time web3 infrastructure company was participated by Blockchain Capital, Foundry Group, Rho, IOSG Ventures, Robot Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, HackVC, Industry Ventures, and others.

With the injection of fresh funds, Blocknative now has $34 million to fund its operations.

Matt Cutler, CEO & Co-Founder of Blocknative, said, “With this new financing round, Blocknative is ideally positioned to vigorously pursue the block building opportunity and help drive equitable value recirculation throughout the entire web3 transaction supply chain. As the world increasingly moves on-chain, Blocknative remains committed to contributing meaningfully to the web3 ecosystem through real-time access to pre-chain data, increased transaction transparency, and web-scale infrastructure availability at each and every block.”

The Ethereum Merge has introduced block builders as a new category of economic actors that provide core Ethereum capabilities as these specialized providers determine precisely which transactions to include on-chain and in what order.

Spencer Bogart, General Partner at Blockchain Capital, said that The Merge marks a new era for Ethereum as it also provides a massive opportunity for Blocknative.

At present, over 475,000 Ethereum validators have staked over 15 million ETH– worth nearly $20 billion in aggregate – to help secure the network and receive rewards for doing so.

Every twelve seconds or 7,200 times a day, block builders compete in a real-time auction to construct the most valuable block for the current proposing validator to add to the chain.

Third-party production of blocks is critical to maintaining Ethereum’s long-term decentralization, security, and availability.

According to data provided by industry dashboard MEVboost.org, to date the Blocknative relay and builders have contributed more than 17,000 blocks to Ethereum’s mainnet, making Blocknative among the most prolific block builders.

In order to dependably transport high-value blocks to validators, Blocknative immediately launched its block relay service after The Merge.

The Blocknative Relay has been rapidly adopted by major staking pool operators and is now accepted by over 290,000 registered validators, or over 60 percent of the global network.

And to support relay diversity and resiliency, Blocknative has open-sourced its internally-developed Dreamboat relay codebase.

Blocknative excels in building high-value blocks due to its comprehensive view of the public mempool, low-latency simulation engine and utility-grade global infrastructure.

The company also recently began accepting transaction bundles from Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) searchers, enabling the production of even higher value blocks for its connected validators.

Queenie Wu, Partner at IOSG Ventures, said that Blocknative has been a core infrastructure provider to many of web3’s leading projects.

Since its launch in 2018, Blocknative has consistently delivered best-in-class global infrastructure, providing a solid real-time foundation for the broader web3 ecosystem.

Blocknative’s rich product portfolio is the easiest way to work with pre-chain data, including searching for Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) opportunities and building profitable transaction bundles.

Blocknative’s proven Transaction Orchestration solutions include Transaction Preview, Web3-Onboard, Mempool Explorer, Gas Estimation and Transaction Distribution Network.