Archway Cosmos Protocol Raised $21M To Provide Developer Rewards

Archway, a Cosmos-based protocol raised $31 million to provide developer rewards while CoinFund and Hashed co-led the seed round behind the project so let’s read more in today’s latest Cosmos news.

Archway is a Cosmos-based protocol that rewards decentralzied application developers built on the network. Phi Labs a contributor to Archway said it raised $21 million in a seed funding round led by Hashed and CoinFund. Phi Labs was spun out of Ignite or known as Tendermint which launched the Cosmo blockchain-interoperability protocol while Cosmos grew to have 38 different blockchains and more than 250 projects built on the ecosystem and over $100 billion in digital assets on the network. The Archway protocol acts as an on-ramp to Cosmos and enables developers to deploy cross-chain dapps and to receive rewards for their contributors to the network as the Phi Labs founder Griffin Anderson said:

“Most layer 1 protocols right now reward validators and miners for performing work for running the actual blockchain. But there’s this whole big ecosystem of participants that are very big contributors to the protocol.  Developers are the most important thing for any layer 1 protocol. They bring users, transactions, and activity to the protocol, but they don’t receive any value for their contribution unless they purchase into the protocol token themselves.”

Archway allocates the native ARCH token to dapps proportional to the amount of the users that they brign to the network and the developers are free to use the rewards however they want which means the dapps can provide incentives for their users without dipping into the limited token treasury:

“A dapp developer can build an app on [Archway] and that app can start to earn native network protocol rewards from inflation and gas rewards that are normally burned or go directly to the miners or the validators of the protocol.”

Anderson said Phi Labs will use the new capital to build software development tools and make it easier for third-party developers to create on top of the protocol. Phi Labs will continue to contribute to Archway while other participants in the funding round including Wintermute, figment, and Chorus also took part. The CoinFund principal Billy DIsham said:

“There’s been a proliferation of smart contracting platforms that have hit the market over the last 12 to 18 months. Most of them have focused on different trade-offs around scalability and decentralization. No one has really ideated on the tokenomics.

“Phi Labs is focused on tokenomics and developer rewards and pays attention to the constituency which is the “lifeblood of any smart contracting platform.”