Institutionally-focused restaking startup Byzantine Finance raises $3 million in pre-seed funding

Byzantine Finance, the startup building a restaking protocol, has raised a $3 million pre-seed round led by Node Capital and Blockwall Ventures.

The financing will go towards the development of Byzantine’s permissionless "aggregation layer," a type of protocol designed to enable multiple blockchains to share liquidity, state and users without sacrificing sovereignty.

More than 30 investors participated in the round, including venture firms Lightshift, Masterkey and Kiln Ventures as well as angel investors from EigenLayer, LayerZero and Ledger, among others.

Restaking is an emerging "primitive" in the crypto economy that enables different proof-of-stake-based protocols and networks to share security assets.

Byzantine’s protocol is specifically geared towards institutions and professional investors looking to earn yield by staking assets to secure multiple protocols simultaneously. The team calls this "an internet bond," in that users commit capital in the form of staked assets to earn interest.

The team notes that the restaking ecosystem is currently fragmented across numerous networks including Ethereum and its Layer 2s as well as other networks including Solana and Bitcoin.

"As we began to research the foundations of Byzantine, we spoke with hundreds of institutional web3 players, and were surprised to hear how many of them were blocked from participating in restaking," co-founder Gaia Ferrero Regis said in a statement. "We allow institutions to build secure, segregated restaking portfolios for their operational and risk needs, helping them maximize returns and turning restaking into an institutional-grade onchain primitive."