Moonbeam’s PureStake raises $6M ahead of parachain launch on Polkadot

The company building Moonbeam is focusing on integration work and a renewed marketing push.

PureStake, the company behind the Moonbeam and Moonriver networks, two parachain candidates for Polkadot and Kusama, respectively, announced a successful $6 million raise.

The funding round was led by CoinFund and included participants such as Binance Labs, ParaFi, Coinbase Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, IOSG Ventures. Some previous seed investors, who had funded the project in September 2020, also joined. These include investors like the Polkadot-centric Hypersphere Ventures, Hashkey, Arrington XRP, A195, KR1, D1 Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Divergence Ventures, and Signum Capital.

The latest PureStake round comes as the Polkadot ecosystem starts gearing up for parachain auctions. Though most parachain candidate projects initially expected a release between Q1 and Q2 of this year, Moonbeam is planning for a Q3 2021 launch. The parachain auction process will be first conducted on Kusama, where Moonbeam is launching a sister network called Moonriver, with auctions on the main Polkadot chain expected soon afterwards.

Moonbeam positions itself as the “Ethereum on Polkadot” chain, looking to closely mirror the Ethereum environment while benefiting from interoperability with the rest of the Polkadot ecosystem. Though many parachains have since added support for the Ethereum Virtual Machine, Moonbeam focuses on the rest of the Ethereum ecosystem, supporting the same addresses, wallets and development tools.

Derek Yoo, CEO of PureStake, told Cointelegraph that the investment will be deployed for further development work and business expansion. Though he noted that the “we have the core Ethereum compatibility work basically done," there will still be continuous development work required to “develop further features, integrations and capabilities over time.” On the business side, the funding will serve to attract “additional marketing resources and funding our expansion to Asia,” Yoo added.

Moonbeam is currently working with some Ethereum DeFi projects to port their projects to the new chain. According to Moonbeam, candidates include SushiSwap, Balancer, IDEX, Ocean Protocol and others.