Node Capital and Digital Currency Group (DCG) co-led a $5 million pre-seed funding round for dWallet Labs, a blockchain security firm developing projects for the Odsy Network, a new layer 1 blockchain focused on decentralized crypto wallets with customizable access permissions.
Digital Currency Group is the parent company of CoinDesk.
The rapid growth of the crypto industry has created an ever-expanding web of access points for new protocols, assets and blockchains, which often means that access has to be held by a centralized entity holding the so-called keys rather than remaining in the hands of the user.
The Odsy Network (pronounced “Odyssey”) serves as the base layer of its own crypto ecosystem built around dynamic decentralized wallets (dWallets), which offer customizable access control. The dWallets are a blockchain primitive, meaning that other projects can build on top of the wallet infrastructure to offer custom access for any other blockchain. Potential use cases include multi-chain decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), or communities centralized around a certain goal, and decentralized finance infrastructure that is interoperable across blockchains.
“Today, we find it trivial that we have the appropriate access control, whether that be for a note-taking app or a bank account,” said Omer Sadika, dWallet Labs founder and CEO, in the press release. “However, when it comes to crypto, we have to choose between poor access control we get from blockchains to centralized solutions that defeat the purpose of being decentralized in the first place.”
Other participants in the funding round included Amplify Partners, Lightshift Capital, Liquid2 Ventures, Collider Ventures, Lemnsicap, Heroic Ventures, Impatient Ventures, Zero Knowledge, Dispersion Capital, Token Bay Capital, Tykhe Block Ventures, Cerulean Ventures and Earl Grey Capital, among others.
The Odsy Network was founded by Sadika, David Lachmish, Sean Lee and Yehonatan Cohen Scaly. The Zug, Switzerland-based Odsy Foundation, which has former Algorand Foundation CEO Lee as executive director, will support and develop the wider Odsy ecosystem. The dWallet Labs research and development entity will provide professional services to the Odsy Foundation and support those building on Odsy Network.
The near-term roadmap for dWallet and the Odsy Network already includes new capital infusions.
“We’re going through the process with the next funding rounds already, and a lot of those will be coming out in the coming weeks and months,” Lee said during an interview with CoinDesk. “The pre-seed round was specifically to build out the team and the interface so that we could bring the Odsy Network out of stealth.”
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