Particle Network, a middleware platform for Web3 applications, announced Friday that it raised $7 million in seed funding to support the easy development of blockchain-based decentralized applications.
The round was led by ABCDE Capital and was joined by other well known crypto investors including Animoca Brands, Hashkey Capital, Longhash Ventures, GSR Ventures and OP Crypto. The company previously raised $1.8 million in pre-seed funding in April last year.
Particle supplies middleware to developers to integrate directly into Web3 and crypto applications alongside secure infrastructure for dealing with crypto assets. To do this, the company provides two primary services, a wallet and a user-friendly login service.
Particle’s login service allows new users to log into apps with just emails, phone numbers or social media – or using their already existing crypto wallets. As a result, they can connect to the app via whatever option they have, making onboarding new users easy. Developers can add it to the code simply as well.
Wallets can also be integrated quickly through a “wallet-as-a-service” infrastructure that the company claims can be up and running in less than 30 minutes. It provides a powerful, non-custodial wallet application programming interface that integrates into any decentralized application quickly and will work quickly. Particle Wallet is designed to allow developers to quickly permit users to buy, sell and swap tokens, as well as nonfungible tokens, across multiple chains.
The platform also provides everything developers need to allow customers to purchase crypto with money directly through their apps. Particle Network handles the regulatory compliance and licensing side to allow developers to focus on coding and growing their app.
Most importantly, the software development kit and APIs use multi-party computation and threshold signature scheme technology to make certain that the users’ always remain in control of their tokens while using Particle’s infrastructure.
“This is how we help the developers or the projects to lower the barriers for the end users, especially for the non-crypto users,” Pengyu Wang, founder of Particle Network, told The Block. “What makes us stand out is that we are not sacrificing the user’s autonomy… Because we are using MPC technologies, we don’t have any room to do evil, so that way, we ensure that the end users still have full control over the assets.”
Particle Network supports numerous use cases for developers including decentralized finance from offering yield and staking, NFTs for collectibles and marketplaces, payments for commerce and peer-to-peer, gaming with pay-to-earn mechanics, and digital identities for metaverse.
In addition to integrated middleware tools, Particle Network provides powerful node API infrastructure support to allow quick access to blockchain data, which can make building an app with scalable data needs extremely easy. The company also has an nonfungible-token solution for managing and scaling NFTs – such as would be needed for a game or marketplace – as a result NFTs can be generated with different rarities, batch minted and tooled as needed.
The platform’s tools are currently available for any blockchain that supports the Ethereum Virtual Machine including Ethereum, Solana, Tron, Polygon and more.
Wang said that since launching in October the platform has brought on board more than 200 projects across GameFi, Web3 and NFT, including Web3 project Ultiverse, gaming publisher FunPlus and the Chinese video game developer Perfect World.
“We are trying to provide the developers with a one-stop solution to help them focus more on business,” said Wang.