Flashbots Seeks to Raise $50M for $1B Valuation: Report
Key points to remember
- Flashbots is looking to raise between $30-50 million.
- MEV is valued at $1 billion.
- Flashbots recently came under fire for their role in censoring Tornado Cash transactions on Ethereum.
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MEV’s lead organization, Flashbots, is running a reverse pitch process to raise between $30 million and $50 million. The company has recently come under fire for its role in censoring Ethereum transactions.
$1 billion valuation
Flashbots is changing its business model.
According to a report by The Blockleading crypto organization MEV is looking to raise between $30 million and $50 million at a $1 billion valuation.
Interestingly, Flashbots would conduct a reverse pitch process: instead of pitching potential investors, the organization invites investors to make their own pitches, which means they have to convince the company to accept their funds. Crypto Investment Fund Paradigm Reportedly Leads Investment Round; the company was Flashbots’ lead investor in its 2020 seed-stage fundraising.
MEV means “maximum extractable value”. The term refers to the arbitrage of on-chain trading opportunities by reordering trades within a block during its production. Flashbots provides an off-chain block-building marketplace for on-chain merchants and validators, with the stated aim of streamlining MEV and mitigating its negative impacts on users. According to Flashbots data, MEV has extract over $687 million from blockchain users since January 2020.
Flashbots, which has presented itself as an Ethereum public good in the past, recently be the subject of controversy on its willingness to censor Tornado Cash-related transactions on Ethereum to comply with OFAC sanctions. According to MEV Watch, at the time of writing, 66% of Ethereum blocks are produced by MEV-Boost relays who have expressed their intention to censor these transactions; Flashbots are responsible for producing over 65% of these censorship blocks. In a sense, the organization’s fundraising efforts mean that investors can be financially rewarded for censoring Ethereum transactions.
Disclaimer: At the time of writing this article, the author of this article owned BTC, ETH, and several other crypto assets.
