Blocknative Raises $15 Million from Blockchain Capital, Foundry Group, and Others to Build Blocks for Ethereum

Blocknative, the real-time web3 infrastructure company, announces a $15.0 million Series A-1 financing from Blockchain Capital, Foundry Group, Rho, IOSG Ventures, Robot Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, HackVC, Industry Ventures, and others, bringing total funding to date to $34.0 million. The funding will be used to drive Blocknative’s leadership in the emerging block building market.

Matt Cutler, CEO & co-founder of Blocknative, said, “With this new financing round, Blocknative is ideally positioned to vigorously pursue the block building opportunity and help drive equitable value recirculation throughout the entire web3 transaction supply chain. As the world increasingly moves on-chain, Blocknative remains committed to contributing meaningfully to the web3 ecosystem through real-time access to pre-chain data, increased transaction transparency, and web-scale infrastructure availability at each and every block.”

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The Ethereum Merge introduced block builders as a new category of economic actors that provide core Ethereum capabilities. These specialized providers determine precisely which transactions to include on-chain and in what order. To date, more than 475,000 Ethereum validators have staked over 15 million ETH – worth nearly $20 billion in aggregate – to help secure the network and receive rewards for doing so. Every twelve seconds, or 7,200 times a day, block builders compete in a real-time auction to construct the most valuable block for the current proposing validator to add to the chain.

Just-in-time third-party production of blocks is critical to maintaining Ethereum’s long-term decentralization, security, and availability. According to industry dashboard MEVboost.org, to date the Blocknative relay and builders have contributed more than 17,000 blocks to Ethereum’s mainnet, making Blocknative among the most prolific block builders.

To dependably transport high-value blocks to validators, Blocknative launched its block relay service immediately after The Merge. The Blocknative Relay has been rapidly adopted by major staking pool operators and now is accepted by more than 290,000 registered validators, or over 60% of the global network. To support relay diversity and resiliency, Blocknative open-sourced its internally-developed Dreamboat relay codebase.

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Blocknative excels at building high-value blocks due to its comprehensive view of the public mempool, low-latency simulation engine, and utility-grade global infrastructure. Blocknative also recently began accepting transaction bundles from MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) searchers, enabling the production of even higher value blocks for its connected validators.

Spencer Bogart, General Partner at Blockchain Capital, said, “The Merge marks a new era for Ethereum and a massive opportunity for Blocknative. We believe in their vision for a more transparent, more flexible, and more equitable ecosystem. This team has a track record of executing with professionalism and reliability. Blocknative’s recent launch of their relay and block building brings them ever closer to operating at the core of Ethereum. ”

Queenie Wu, Partner at IOSG Ventures, said, “Blocknative has been a core infrastructure provider to many of web3’s leading projects. I first connected with them while leading partnerships for a top Ethereum wallet provider and was impressed with the reliability and quality of their platform. I am excited to help the team expand into block building and scale their offerings to more projects in Asia.”

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