Company Will Use Funding to Launch the Ethereum-Compatible
Smart Contract Platform as a Parachain on Polkadot

Boston, MA – September 23, 2020 – PureStake, the company developing the Moonbeam smart contract platform, announced the completion of a $1.4 million seed round led by Hypersphere Ventures, a venture firm focused on Polkadot founded by Polkadot co-founder Robert Habermeier. Other notable participants include Arrington XRP Capital, HashKey, KR1, Bitcoin.com Exchange, and Du Capital. The funding will be used to accelerate development of the Moonbeam network, a Polkadot parachain focused on interoperability.

“Polkadot was designed to enable the creation of many blockchains, each one specialized and optimized for specific purposes,” says Robert Habermeier, Co-Founder of the Polkadot Network and Partner at Hypersphere Ventures. “Moonbeam is a great example of this principle: their smart contract platform is specialized to be accessible to a large segment of developers already familiar with Ethereum developer tools and will serve as an on-ramp to Polkadot for this community.”

BetProtocol, an Esports betting and crypto-casino protocol, will develop an implementation of their system on the Moonbeam Kusama and Polkadot networks, to allow entrepreneurs to launch blockchain betting apps with no coding required.

“Moonbeam gives us quick and easy access to users and assets in the quickly-growing Polkadot ecosystem,” says Rui Pedro Teixeira, Co-Founder of BetProtocol. “And we can develop our application using Solidity and Web3 — skills we already have — rather than needing to learn Rust and develop our own parachain using Substrate.”

Linear Finance, the first cross-chain compatible, decentralized delta-one asset protocol, is also working on projects that will leverage Moonbeam smart contracts.

“We are truly impressed by the Moonbeam team’s technological expertise in cross-chain integration and easy-to-use developer tools that allow us to quickly integrate and deploy on Polkadot with the existing Ethereum codebase,” said Drey Ng, Co-Founder and Product Lead at Linear Finance. “Users can enjoy a familiar dApp environment with a better user experience. We are excited for this partnership and see long-term value in this collaboration.”

Announced earlier this year and currently in active development, Moonbeam is a smart contract platform on Polkadot that is focused on Ethereum compatibility. This compatibility includes the ability to run Solidity smart contracts and applications built using the Web3 API. Further, Moonbeam supports popular Ethereum development tools like Truffle, Remix, and MetaMask, which allows Ethereum developers to quickly deploy applications to the Polkadot network.

The Moonbeam team received a grant from the Web3 Foundation in August 2020 for their work developing a Web3-compatible RPC library.

“From the start, we’ve been inspired by the idea of an open, interoperable blockchain ecosystem,” says Derek Yoo, CEO of PureStake. “The growth we’ve seen in our community and this investment are both expressions of support for the vision of a multi-chain future. We will be using these funds to expand the team and to help us deliver a strong Polkadot MainNet deployment next year.”

Moonbeam launched its first TestNet earlier this year and expects to deliver a parachain deployment on Polkadot in Q2 2021.

Visit the Moonbeam website for more information and updates: https://moonbeam.network/

About the Moonbeam Network

Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on the Polkadot network that makes it easy to build natively interoperable applications. This Ethereum compatibility allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and DApp frontends to Moonbeam with minimal changes. As a parachain on the Polkadot network, Moonbeam will benefit from the shared security of the Polkadot relay chain and integrations with other chains that are connected to Polkadot. Currently in active development by PureStake, Moonbeam is expected to reach MainNet by early 2021. Learn more: https://moonbeam.network/

About PureStake

PureStake’s team has extensive experience building technology companies and complex software platforms. Led by Derek Yoo, former Fuze Founder and CTO, PureStake provides protocol implementation services and creates developer tools for next-generation blockchain networks. Learn more: https://www.purestake.com/