Ethereum transaction protocol Eden Network has raised $17.4 million in seed funding from some of blockchain’s biggest venture funds, underscoring the need to address ongoing challenges facing the block production economy.
The funds will be used to support the adoption of Eden Network among developers, miners and users, the company announced Wednesday. The network claims all users will benefit from its ordering rules thanks to an improved block production system.
The investment round was led by Multicoin Capital with participation from Alameda Research, Jump Capital, Wintermute, GSR and DeFiance Capital. Genesis Capital executive Joshua Lim and Andre Cronje of Yearn.finance also participated as angel investors.
Eden officially launched along with Ethereum’s London hard fork on Sunday, claiming to represent more than half of the network’s hash power. That assertion means more Eden blocks are being produced on Ethereum than non-Eden blocks. Users can stake the protocol’s native EDEN tokens to gain access to priority block space and the Eden Relay Remote Procedure Call, which allows transactions to be submitted privately.
Related: Ethereum London hard fork goes live
Eden is attempting to democratize miner extractable revenue, or MEV, which measures a miner’s ability to profit from arbitrarily deciding where and when transactions occur. As Cointelegraph reported in October 2020, researchers have already uncovered Ethereum block manipulation as a means to exploit certain DeFi protocols. In the wake of the London hard fork, several mining pools have begun resorting to MEV to increase their net revenues. This move may pose a direct challenge to EIP-1559’s promise of lower gas fees.
Nevertheless, the anticipation and trigger of the London hard fork have been overwhelmingly bullish for Ether (ETH). The second-largest crypto reached above $4,000 last week for the first time since May. As Cointelegraph recently reported, Bloomberg senior commodity strategist Mike McGlone believes $5,000 ETH is likely in the near term. The outlook likely hasn't changed in the wake of a sizable flash crash for ETH and the broader cryptocurrency market on Tuesday.