Announcing our $7M seed round from Paradigm and our collaboration with Optimism

Andrew Huang

March 28, 2023

Introducing Conduit

We’re thrilled to announce Conduit, a crypto native infrastructure and Rollups-as-a-Service platform designed to empower and accelerate the builders in crypto. Our first offering allows teams to scale their applications 100-fold by allowing them to spin up a production-grade rollup, built on the OP Stack, in a fraction of the time. App-specific rollups on Conduit are launched, maintained, and scaled by infrastructure professionals so that teams can focus on what’s most important: building products that users love.

DeFi protocols, gaming companies, NFT platforms, and other on-chain providers can use Conduit to quickly and easily scale their applications, offering a better user experience and unlocking new use cases previously made impossible by network congestion.

Conduit deployments come complete with everything you’ll need to be successful from day one, including a block explorer, autoscalable RPCs, metrics, and samsczun’s transaction tracer. Your deployments will run the same tech as Optimism Mainnet and will be secured by Ethereum.

Why Conduit and Rollups?

The past market cycle has shown that the rising costs of building on Ethereum L1 is limiting the broader adoption of crypto. While developers may use shared Layer 2s to mitigate these issues, these projects are not immune to congestion issues, with gas fees spiking during periods of high usage.

While the benefits of app-specific rollups are numerous, launching your own is challenging. Getting to production can take 3-6 months of engineering effort to build the supporting components users expect, not to mention staffing, maintaining, and upgrading the rollup. For many teams, the overhead is a non-starter.

Conduit saves you time by giving you a managed rollup deployment with batteries included on-demand. We let you get started in minutes instead of months.

The OP Stack and Optimism

Optimism is pioneering a new blockchain architecture that allows applications to host their own computing environment — providing next-gen scalability without compromising on security. With its recently revealed Superchain vision, and with the team at Base joining as core developers, the OP Stack codebase has a clear path to becoming the standard for scaling in crypto.

We’re excited to announce our collaboration with the Optimism Foundation to help power the Superchain vision and contribute to the incredible community of builders that comprise the Optimism community. Conduit makes it easier for builders today to launch their own OP Stack rollups that will eventually become a part of the Superchain through our RaaS platform. Every team in crypto will need their own dedicated rollup in the same way that traditional tech companies have their own compute instances in the cloud, and we’re thrilled to be collaborating with the Optimism Foundation to bring the OP Stack and Superchain to the masses.

Conduit provides a managed service for rollups launched on our RaaS platform, which includes automatic code updates to the OP Stack and an upgrade to the Superchain, when available. Additionally, the Conduit team will manage roadmap feedback and offer custom support SLAs to ensure our users' success with rollup deployment.

Teams that launch rollups with Conduit will also be eligible to earn a share of the sequencer fees and MEV from their rollup – providing an instant path to monetization that is incentive-aligned with their users. A portion of fee revenue will also be committed to the Optimism Collective, ensuring the sustainability of the OP Stack and the other public goods which will power the Superchain.

If this is something you’re interested in, you can learn more and get in touch with us on our website here, or visit the app to practice launching your own OP Stack rollup in just a few minutes. (Seriously, it's ridiculously easy!)

Our $7M in funding by Paradigm, and what’s next

We’re delighted to share that we’ve secured $7M in seed funding in a round led by Paradigm, with additional investment from accomplished individuals, including Robert Miller, Ludwig Pettersson, Dan Romero, Guillaume Poncin, Joshua Ma, and Lakshman Sankar.

We’re a small, highly-technical team spread across California and Europe that previously helped build companies like Instagram, Meta, Wish, and Quill. We believe that scaling crypto will have a massive impact on how the products of the future will be built – if this mission resonates with you, we’re looking for a few more great folks to join our founding team.

A special thanks to Georgios Konstantopoulos, Nick Martitsch, Dan Robinson, Sam Sun, Achal Srinivasan, Dan McCarthy, and of course Fred and Matt. Their hands-on help throughout the process has been invaluable, and we look forward to partnering with Paradigm for the long-term.