The round was led by Brevan Howard Digital and Electric Capital, with investments from Coinbase Ventures, Kraken Ventures, Lemniscap, Franklin Templeton, Avon Ventures, Mechanism, Lightspeed Faction, Consensys, Animoca and GSR, the company said in a press release.

The fresh round of capital will be used to help launch Puffer’s mainnet. Prior to this, Puffer raised $5.5 million in a funding round co-led by Lemniscap and Lightspeed Faction.

Puffer is the second-largest liquid restaking protocol behind Ether.Fi, and is part of a class of protocols that have come out of the growing "restaking" field that has taken the Ethereum ecosystem by storm. EigenLayer, a restaking pioneer that launched last week albeit without some of its more highly anticipated functionality, has attracted some $12.7 billion of user deposits to become the second-biggest decentralized-finance protocol, according to DeFiLlama.

Liquid restaking protocols work by taking deposits and putting them into EigenLayer, which lets Ethereum stakers earn yield for using their ETH tokens to help secure third-party platforms known as "actively validated services” (AVS). Puffer is an AVS on EigenLayer.

Puffer then hands out their own token, pufETH, to its users representing their deposit, allowing them to use that token for trading or for other purposes.

In March, Puffer passed $1 billion in deposits, signaling excitement for restaking even before the mainnet protocol has gone live.

“With our upcoming mainnet launch, we aim to significantly reduce the barriers for home validators to participate, while delivering the most advanced liquid restaking protocol,” said Amir Amir Forouzani, CEO at Puffer Finance. “This is a major step forward for Ethereum’s decentralization and the wider restaking ecosystem."

CORRECTION (April 16, 15:01 UTC): After publication of this story, Puffer clarified that Avon Ventures made an investment in this funding round, not Fidelity. Avon Ventures is affiliated with Fidelity's parent company, FMR LLC. The Puffer team acknowledged that they had made this mistake in the original release.

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Margaux Nijkerk

Margaux Nijkerk reports on the Ethereum protocol and L2s. A graduate of Johns Hopkins and Emory universities, she has a masters in International Affairs & Economics. She holds a small amount of ETH and other altcoins.