Versatus raises $2.3M to launch the world’s first stateless rollup; now valued at $50 million

Blockchain technology has advanced significantly in recent years, showing great promise. But despite impressive progress, blockchain technology still faces some technical challenges. One notable issue is scalability. To tackle this, one proposed solution is the traditional rollup approach. In this method, blockchain transactions are handled off-chain and later submitted to the main chain in batches.

Despite its potential, a drawback emerges as the number of transactions increases. Processing these transactions becomes slower and more costly. Unfortunately, traditional rollups don’t effectively resolve this issue, ultimately impacting the overall performance and efficiency of the blockchain network.

Recognizing these challenges, Versatus Labs, a blockchain startup that provides a Peer-to-Peer Web Services Protocol that enables Web2 developers to seamlessly transition to Web3, has come up with a transformative solution through a stateless rollup on Ethereum.

Today, Versatus Labs announced it has secured $2.3 million in funding, with notable contributions from key investors NGC Ventures and Republic Crypto, pushing its valuation to $50 million. Versatus will use the funding proceeds to launch the world’s first Stateless Rollup, Versatus LASR.

Founded by seasoned Distributed Systems expert Andrew Smith, Versatus is breaking new ground in decentralized verifiable compute innovation. The platform facilitates a smooth transition for developers from Web2 to Web3, ensuring unparalleled speed and cost-efficiency without compromising security and maintaining broad decentralization. With Versatus, developers can leverage familiar tools and frameworks for tasks such as prototyping, optimization, DevOps, testing, and deployment, facilitating a seamless shift from Web2 to Web3.

Having secured a total funding of $3.7 million, Versatus boasts support from key investors including Jump Crypto, BigBrain Holdings, NGC Ventures, Republic Crypto, Taureon Group, and Hyperithm. The platform has formed strategic partnerships with EigenLayer, a data availability service, Stader Labs, a liquid staking platform, and Anagram, a Web3 venture.

Unlike the traditional rollups, Versatus LASR stands out as a pure execution environment that moves computation off-chain, eliminating the associated obligations and costs of maintaining state and saving data. LASR empowers developers to build intricate and data-intensive smart contracts, facilitate cross-chain native asset transfers, integrate cross-chain contracts, and much more.

The Versatus stateless rollup, LASR, introduces a revolutionary technology that enables stateless verification of smart contract transactions, irrespective of programming language. In essence, Versatus LASR significantly reduces the costs and inefficiencies of Ethereum, and does away with the challenges and centralization linked to optimistic roll-ups, all while providing a vastly improved developer experience with a 100x enhancement.

In a statement, Sreeram, founder of EigenLayer, said: “Stateless verification is a key feature required to enable infinite scaling of optimistic rollups while preserving verifiability by regular nodes, which can sample and verify portions of the state update. Stateless verifiers are a key milestone in the future of the Ethereum scaling roadmap and we are excited to partner with Versatus to bring this key unlock to the modular Ethereum landscape.”

Joseph Eagan, co-founder of Anagram, commented: “I’ve gotten to know Andrew, and I can confidently say he is the most sober mind in the space, unphased by hype cycles or FUD. Andrew is on a mission to solve a real problem and has done the groundwork to deeply understand it. Versatus LASR delivers a solution to the problem and ushers in a new era of web3, one that takes crypto from the fringes of the tech community and places it at the center.”