"Byzantine Finance Raises $3M for Cross-Chain Liquidity Protocol"

Byzantine Finance, a startup focused on institutionally-focused restaking, has raised $3 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Node Capital and Blockwall Ventures. The financing will support the development of Byzantine's permissionless "aggregation layer," a protocol designed to enable multiple blockchains to share liquidity, state, and users without compromising sovereignty.

The round saw participation from over 30 investors, including venture firms Lightshift, Masterkey, and Kiln Ventures, as well as angel investors from EigenLayer, LayerZero, and Ledger, among others. Restaking, an emerging primitive in the crypto economy, enables different proof-of-stake-based protocols and networks to share security assets.

Byzantine's protocol is tailored to institutions and professional investors seeking to earn yield by staking assets to secure multiple protocols simultaneously. The team refers to this as an "internet bond," where users commit capital in the form of staked assets to earn interest. The restaking ecosystem is currently fragmented across various networks, including Ethereum and its Layer 2s, as well as other networks like Solana and Bitcoin.

Co-founder Gaia Ferrero Regis noted, "As we began to research the foundations of Byzantine, we spoke with hundreds of institutional web3 players, and were surprised to hear how many of them were blocked from participating in restaking. We allow institutions to build secure, segregated restaking portfolios for their operational and risk needs, helping them maximize returns and turning restaking into an institutional-grade onchain primitive."