Staking-as-a-Service Startup Raises $2 Million From DHVC, Plug and Play

InfStones, a Silicon Valley staking startup, has raised a $2 million seed round to expand its block-producing capacity in proof-of-stake (PoS) networks.

The company said in an announcement on Wednesday that leading investors in the round include venture capital firms such as Danhua VC (DHVC) and Plug and Play Ventures, which is known for investing in the early stages of PayPal and Dropbox.

InfStones, which was founded in 2018 and operates as a full node and block producer for PoS blockchains, said it will use the new equity financing to expand its existing five-person team and bring its service to additional PoS chains.

"While proof-of-work has become stable and well-established thanks to early participants, we believe PoS will be the driving force to bring exponential growth to the blockchain industry in the future," said InfStones founder and CEO Jonathan Shi, a former engineer at Oracle.

Currently, the firm is a block producer for nine PoS blockchains including EOS, Tron, Cosmos and Tezos. The company aggregates PoS token holders’ votes to participate in the block producing process of PoS chains in order to receive mining rewards.

InfStones then distributes these rewards to holders who cast votes but takes a 10–30 percent commission, depending on the design of the different chains.

For instance, ranking data for the EOS blockchain shows InfStones' full node has over 90 million votes, staking over $450 million worth of EOS on its node, based on the current price of EOS.

In addition to its investment, Shi said DHVC helped InfStones get large EOS holders to use the service for staking EOS.

Staking image via Shutterstock