Original Title: "40 Million Financing, Participation of Vitalik, Etherealize Aims to be the 'Spokesperson' for Ethereum"
Original Author: Eric, Foresight News
According to a report by Fortune magazine on the evening of September 3rd, Beijing time, Etherealize has completed a $40 million financing round, led by Electric Capital and Paradigm, with participation from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation. Electric Capital and Paradigm are known for their significant investments in the Web3 space, particularly within the Ethereum ecosystem, and both are major supporters of Ethereum DAT listed companies. However, it is rare for both Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation to be directly involved.
Etherealize is quite reserved in its self-introduction, describing itself on X as "an institutional-grade product, BD, and marketing department for the Ethereum ecosystem," while its website only states its vision of "remaking Wall Street" and "bringing the world to Ethereum through research, content, and products." In terms of products, Etherealize targets institutional-grade infrastructure, offering issuance, management, settlement of tokenized assets, and corresponding automated compliance infrastructure, with plans to introduce privacy features through zero-knowledge proofs.
According to Etherealize, it has a well-informed engineering team about Ethereum, a leadership team with decades of experience in financial institutions, and channels to engage with the SEC, Treasury, and Congress to formulate regulations. Western investment institutions have traditionally been generous in betting on large B2B businesses, but the substantial financial investment in such a startup is clearly a "people investment," and I have noticed some clues from the team composition.
The most notable member of the Etherealize team is co-founder Danny Ryan, who made significant contributions to The Merge and the Ethereum Beacon Chain but left the Ethereum Foundation team in September last year. In his farewell letter on GitHub, Danny Ryan stated that his departure was for personal reasons; perhaps at that moment he realized that merely nitpicking on technical aspects would not advance Ethereum further, and that a team capable of assisting in bringing Ethereum to the world through its technical capabilities was the right answer.
On the technical side, Etherealize's co-founder and CTO Zash Obront was a co-founder of Scribe Media, which provided book publishing services, and joined Snowcap Technology as a security researcher in August 2021. This company focuses on security, offering services in AI, VPN, WIFI, and enterprise systems.
The other two founding engineers responsible for technology also have impressive backgrounds. Alec Charbonneau was previously a product manager at Circle, known as the "first stock of stablecoins," and later worked as a software engineer at Stellar, which, like Ripple, focuses on settlement; another engineer, Alex Wilton, worked as a product manager at Tesla and at Rivian, another electric vehicle company that raised over $10 billion in 2021.
The resume of product CEO Jay Katz is closely related to strategy, having worked in finance, software, smart hardware, law firms, and consulting companies. LinkedIn information shows that his actual position is CEO of lending market solutions. Working alongside him is credit operations manager Jennifer Laino, who has extensive experience in the financial industry, having served as an assistant vice president at Lehman Brothers, a vice president at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and a consultant at Blackstone Group.
Co-founder and CEO Vivek Raman also has many years of experience in financial lending, having served as a credit business executive at Morgan Stanley, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura, and joined Celsius as a senior DeFi researcher in September 2021, during the bear market of 2022. Afterward, Vivek Raman joined BitOoda, a digital asset investment bank that completed its Series A financing in early 2023, as general manager. At BitOoda, he focused on bringing institutions into the Ethereum and L2 ecosystem.
Clearly, Etherealize's plan to "bring Wall Street to Ethereum" initially targets the credit sector. I speculate that its path to realization will involve launching on-chain lending systems combined with stablecoins. Of course, such products differ from DeFi and may only provide solutions for financial institutions.
In terms of market and operations, Etherealize has chosen candidates with more experience in the Web3 space. Marketing director Valeria Salazar previously served as marketing strategy director and developer and ecosystem relations director at Phi Labs, while business operations manager Morgan Takach was previously the strategic and operations director at Polyhedra.
Etherealize's description of its team having rich experience in both Web3 and finance is not unfounded, and it coincidentally seizes the opportunity as institutions are increasingly attempting asset tokenization. The story of reshaping finance with Ethereum is one that has been told since the beginning of the DeFi Summer. Even as traditional institutions are testing the waters of asset on-chain, we still cannot determine the market size of this business, but building a bridge between Ethereum and Wall Street is a direction worth exploring for Ethereum.
In addition to specific business operations, Etherealize has also clearly expressed its desire to act as a "spokesperson" for Ethereum to promote the adoption of Ethereum and the L2 ecosystem worldwide. Overall, Etherealize is taking over the "go to market" part that the Ethereum Foundation did poorly through a commercial company, and the specific effects are worth looking forward to.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
