In Avail, a startup enabling users to quickly create their blockchains, $27 million was raised in a financing round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and the crypto investment fund Dragonfly Capital.
As interest in cryptocurrencies is picking up again, the technology that underpins the industry – blockchain – is getting its moment in the sun. This might signal a turning point for blockchains: the technology is about to find a new use and a better way of applying distributed technology to business.
Lead role in the $27 million funding round of Avail by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund put the tech world on alert that blockchain technology promises much for such innovations Abetted by Thiel, who was a co-founder of PayPal, one of the first large hands-off payment firms in the world – dislodging business models based on domination and favoritism, replacing them with innovation, growth, and disruption.
What is so interesting, however, is that it is relatively easy to build custom blockchains – and hence to design them in ways that perfectly fit the needs of firms who want to reap the benefits of distributed technology in a legally safer way than, say, using bitcoins. Avail provides a compelling value proposition by allowing its customers to simply build new custom blockchains for the specific needs of their business as they see fit, entirely without any technical know-how or staff.
Moreover, Avail’s commitment to usability and accessibility fits nicely with the ongoing trend to democratize blockchain. Avail is democratizing the use of blockchain technology by reducing the barriers to entry and catalyzing open-source innovations, enabling small businesses to discover these possibilities themselves and create value in areas that could benefit the most from what blockchain can now accomplish.
It’s our earnest hope that Avail’s $27 million in funding from investors is the final confirmation that we are bringing the future of the blockchain out of the realm of speculation and back into the hands of the technologists. We will live in a world in which the transformative power of this technology isn’t limited to billionaires intent on uprooting the modern state but is available to all of us and democratized in a way that enables even those of us without enormous sums of capital to build the tools, practices, and processes for a more decentralized and inclusive world.
Source: Shounak Dasgupta, Yahoo! Finance February 26, 2024
