Nomad Raises $22M Seed Round for Security-first Interoperability
TL;DR — we’ve raised ~$22M at a $225M valuation in our seed round, led by Polychain and with participation from 1kx, Ethereal, Hack VC, Circle Ventures, and others. We’ll use this capital to grow the team, increase awareness of Nomad, and bring security-first interoperability to more ecosystems.
Good and Secure Bridging
The past year has been a whirlwind for cross-chain interoperability. From being an esoteric subset of crypto that only infrastructure specialists focused on, interop is now clearly in the zeitgeist.
This is partially due to bridge hacks accounting for over $1.5B in just six months. Bridge exploits now hold the top three spots of highest value hacks in all of crypto, and it is clear that many more will come.
But it’s also because we’ve begun a new turn of the infrastructure cycle. The last infrastructure cycle focused on the deployment of new Layer 1 platforms, many of which are thriving today. Projects that originated in the previous cycle such as Solana, Avalanche, Near and Polygon have all come to fruition, offering users new applications and developers new opportunities to build them.
As such, users (or bridgoooors) “ape” their liquidity from Ethereum into other chains, to participate in these blossoming ecosystems. However, aside from Cosmos and Polkadot, most ecosystems lack native interoperability and need to rely on third-party bridges which are often hastily constructed and insecure.
Developers also need their apps to be multi-chain ASAP, and have no choice but to lean into available offerings, compounding the risk for users. The good news is that this is perfectly normal for a nascent infrastructure phase — the need for infra always outpaces its maturity. But now that the need is clear, we need the infra to become mature — we need secure bridges.
The Nomad Mission
Nomad’s founding team has been working on interoperability for over 4 years now. In 2017 several of us worked on Summa, an R&D firm for cross-chain interoperability. Summa’s research on atomic transactions, SPV proofs, and zero-knowledge-based cross-chain communications provides the foundation for much of modern interoperability technology. While there, they provided technology to Keep Network’s tBTC and Near’s Aurora EVM.
After many years of researching and implementing light-client based systems, they realized that header relays, while theoretically the most secure way to construct bridges, were not extensible and hard to deploy across heterogeneous ecosystems.
But their thorough exploration of the interop idea maze led to a breakthrough — optimism. By leveraging fraud proofs in the vein of optimistic rollups, we can construct a more trust-minimized bridge that is also easy to deploy across varied ecosystems. This was the insight that eventually led to Nomad.
“Our goal with Nomad is to provide a security-first interoperability solution that can be deployed today.”
Our goal with Nomad is to provide a security-first interoperability solution that can be deployed today. We believe in the vision of fully trustless bridges, but also realize that the market won’t wait for them to arrive. People want to bridge now, and we need to enable them to do it safely. As such, Nomad is designed around principles that prioritize safety, simplicity, and our users.
Nomad’s success will pave the way for the next wave of applications that will effortlessly be deployed across many chains and compose liquidity and state regardless of where it originated. This will usher in a new wave of users that in the long run will not even need to know what chain they are interacting with.
The Future of Cross-chain is Optimistic
In pursuit of this goal, we’ve raised ~$22M at a $225M valuation in our first fundraising round, led by Polychain and with participation from 1kx, Ethereal, Hack VC, Circle Ventures, Amber, Archetype, Lattice, A&T Capital, Hypersphere, Dialectic, Breyer Capital, Figment, LedgerPrime, Robot Ventures, Continue Capital, Wave Financial, Open Web Collective, and many more funds and angels.
Our goals in the next three to six months are to:
- Deploy to many more chains
- Grow our team (we’re 13 strong now 💪)
- Improve awareness and mindshare
- Progressively decentralize the system
We’re excited to use this new round of funding to scale out security-first interop channels across the crypto ecosystem!
Become a Madlad
No crypto project can grow without a community. In that vein we are grateful for our early supporters and community members that were the earliest champions of Nomad. A special thanks to our closest partners:
- Connext
- Moonbeam / PureStake
- Milkomeda C1 / dcSpark
- Evmos / Tharsis
- Neon / Neon Labs
If you’re interested in becoming a madlad, join the community:
And of course we’re hiring across the board, and would love to hear from you at gm@nomad.xyz 🌞.
