Blocknative Raises $15M from Blockchain Capital, Foundry Group, and Others to Build Blocks for Ethereum

San Francisco, CA; December 15, 2022 

Blocknative, the real-time web3 infrastructure company, announces a $15.0 million Series A-1 financing from Blockchain Capital, Foundry Group, Rho, IOSG Ventures, Robot Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, HackVC, Industry Ventures, and others, bringing total funding to date to $34.0 million. The funding will be used to drive Blocknative's leadership in the emerging block building market.

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 introduced block builders as a new category of economic actors that provide core Ethereum capabilities. These specialized providers determine precisely which transactions to include on-chain and in what order. To date, more than 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. 

Just-in-time third-party production of blocks is critical to maintaining Ethereum’s long-term decentralization, security, and availability. According to 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.

To dependably transport high-value blocks to validators, Blocknative launched its block relay service immediately after The Merge. The Blocknative Relay has been rapidly adopted by major staking pool operators and now is accepted by more than 290,000 registered validators, or over 60% of the global network. To support relay diversity and resiliency, Blocknative open-sourced its internally-developed Dreamboat relay codebase. 

Blocknative excels at building high-value blocks due to its comprehensive view of the public mempool, low-latency simulation engine, and utility-grade global infrastructure. Blocknative also recently began accepting transaction bundles from MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) searchers, enabling the production of even higher value blocks for its connected validators.

Spencer Bogart, General Partner at Blockchain Capital, said, "The Merge marks a new era for Ethereum and a massive opportunity for Blocknative. We believe in their vision for a more transparent, more flexible, and more equitable ecosystem. This team has a track record of executing with professionalism and reliability. Blocknative's recent launch of their relay and block building brings them ever closer to operating at the core of Ethereum. ” 

Queenie Wu, Partner at IOSG Ventures, said, “Blocknative has been a core infrastructure provider to many of web3’s leading projects. I first connected with them while leading partnerships for a top Ethereum wallet provider and was impressed with the reliability and quality of their platform. I am excited to help the team expand into block building and scale their offerings to more projects in Asia.” 

Since launching 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 easy way to work with pre-chain data, including  searching for Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) opportunities and building profitable transaction bundles. In addition to the relay and block building, Blocknative’s proven Transaction Orchestration solutions include Transaction Preview, Web3-Onboard, Mempool Explorer, and Gas Estimation. As part of this financing, Blocknative is actively growing its product teams.

For media inquiries, please contact Phil LeRoy at (310) 260-7901 or Phil(at)MelrosePR(dot)com

About Blocknative

Blocknative is a leading Ethereum block builder. The company’s real-time infrastructure enables validators and searchers to optimize staking rewards and trading profit. Blocknative’s Transaction Orchestration platform prices, previews, distributes and monitors transactions so web3 users can transact with confidence. Blocknative democratizes access to pre-chain data and provides the power to see into the future, improving web3 user experiences and enabling MEV value recirculation. Founded in 2018, Blocknative helps inform and power such forward-thinking projects as Lido, MetaMask, imToken, Curve, Balancer, Ethereum Foundation, Polygon Foundation, and hundreds of others. #ShareTheMEV