Crypto Firm FARE Protocol Raises $6.2M Ahead of Token Launch
The fundraise was led by C Squared Ventures and Goat Capital, the firm co-founded by Twitch founder Justin Kan.
FARE Protocol has raised $6.2 million in a seed round led by Goat Capital – the firm managed by Twitch founder Justin Kan – and C Squared Ventures. The fundraise comes ahead of the ecosystem and native token launch on Ethereum layer 2 blockchain Arbitrum later this year.
Arbitrum was recently at the center of one of the most-hyped events in recent memory: an airdrop of its long-awaited ARB token to early builders, users and investors. The event came with some controversy related to the Arbitrum DAO prematurely moving nearly $1 billion of the tokens to the Arbitrum Foundation before a vote on how to use the funds had finished.
The FARE ecosystem is built on probability smart contracts, which are triggered by transparent on-chain events based on probability variables. The first use case for the contracts is randomized minting and burning (or “winning” and “losing”) of the FARE token. The system is designed so the probability of losing or burning a token is higher than minting or winning, similar to how a real-world casino operates. Instead of a centralized “house" getting the profits, the value is passed along to FARE holders through token deflation.
Other investors in the round included 6th Man Ventures, Arrington Capital, Eniac Ventures, Spark Digital Capital, Morningstar Ventures, Quantstamp and DWeb3, among others.
Read more: The Pluses and Minuses of Regulating Crypto as Gambling
Update (May 2 UTC 13:21): Update removes Republic Crypto from the list of backers and clarifies how value is passed along to FARE holders.
Brandy Betz
Brandy covered crypto-related venture capital deals for CoinDesk. She previously served as the Technology News Editor at Seeking Alpha and covered healthcare stocks for The Motley Fool. She doesn't currently own any substantial amount of crypto.