$102 Million: A16z, Polychain Back Blockchain Project Dfinity's Funding Round

Decentralized cloud startup Dfinity just raised $102 million to further its work in developing an "internet computer," TechCrunch reported Wednesday.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz's new a16z Crypto branch and Polychain Capital lead the funding round for the Switzerland-based project, which is working to build a decentralized cloud computing platform. Dfinity also saw investments from Multicoin Capital, Scalar Capital, SV Angel, Aspect Ventures, Village Global, Amino Capital, KR1 and, according to TechCrunch, contributions from members of the Dfinity community.

Dfinity claims to have now raised nearly $200 million toward its goal, including through a $61 million fundraising round in February which also saw Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain invest.

Planned to be publicly accessible, the network is scheduled to launch later this year. To that end, the company is already running a testnet for the platform, and has published a brief demonstration of how it operates.

The company announced earlier this year that it was airdropping roughly $35 million in its DFN tokens to its community, though individuals will not receive any tokens until the mainnet is live.

Dfinity hopes to launch its world computer, what it refers to as "the cloud 3.0," by creating a scalable network that is more efficient than proof-of-work consensus (employed by bitcoin among other protocols), but more decentralized than a system with nodes or super nodes, according to TechCrunch.

This network would be capable of hosting the "next generation of software and services," founder and chief scientist Dominic Williams said. To that end, the network will be open source, which should make it both more secure and cheaper to operate.

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