Peter Thiel-Backed Founders Fund Invests in Layer N’s Ethereum Scaling Tech

The new Ethereum scaling network Layer N has raised $5 million in a seed funding round led by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and investment collective dao5.

The funding round, announced by Layer N on Wednesday this week, also saw participation from several other notable crypto investment firms, including Kraken Ventures, Mirana Ventures, GSR and Amber Group.

“We’re incredibly excited to announce our $5M seed round led by @foundersfund and @daofive, alongside other major funds and angels,” the team wrote in a statement on X.

It added that the funding round marks the project’s “first milestone towards building Ethereum’s financial superlayer.”

‘Ethereum’s financial layer’

In a thread on X, Layer N brands itself as “Ethereum’s financial layer,” with low fees and high transaction throughput.

The thread further described Layer N as “the first layer 2 network on Ethereum specifically designed for and to scale DeFi,” and said it “aims to rival existing traditional financial networks.”

Introducing Layer N — Ethereum's financial layer:

A financial "N"etwork of hyper-performant zk-OP hybrid roll-ups with native inter-rollup messaging and shared liquidity.

Modular, ultra-low fees, high throughput, <100ms latency, Layer N is built to scale DeFi on Ethereum. pic.twitter.com/gpuExGg3mn

— Layer N 🔲 (@LayerN_Official) September 5, 2023

Ethereum’s base layer has for a long time struggled with high fees and slow transaction speeds, offering an incentive for developers to build layers on top of it that are better suited for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.

Founders Fund’s increasing crypto focus

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund stood for $1.8 million of the total amount raised in Layer N’s funding round, the team behind the project confirmed to The Block.

The investment from Peter Thiel’s fund came after it in April hired at Pantera Capital’s former co-chief investment officer, Joey Krug, as a partner.

Peter Thiel has long been a proponent of Bitcoin (BTC) and crypto more broadly, and reports have even indicated that he may have crossed paths with Satoshi Nakamoto in Aguilla more than 20 years ago

Thiel’s fund also made headlines early this year when it became known that it had realized more than $1 billion in profits from selling off the vast majority of its crypto holdings shortly before the market crashed.