Puffer Finance, a liquid restaking protocol operating on Ethereum and built on EigenLayer, has successfully secured $18 million in a Series A funding round. The investment was co-led by Brevan Howard Digital and Electric Capital.
Joining in this round were various notable investors including Coinbase Ventures, Kraken Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Avon Ventures (affiliated with FMR LLC, the parent company of Fidelity Investments), Mechanism Capital, Lightspeed Faction, Consensys, Animoca, GSR, and Lemniscap. Additionally, angel investors such as Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, Wormhole co-founder Anthony Ramirez, AltLayer co-founder Yaoqi Jia, and Pendle Finance core contributor Anton Buenavista participated.
This funding round, structured as a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT), brings Puffer’s fully diluted token valuation to $200 million. Notably, Puffer had previously received backing from Binance Labs earlier in the year, and in the past, it secured a $5.5 million seed funding round and a $650,000 pre-seed round.
The Ethereum restaking vertical has been witnessing significant growth since EigenLayer’s launch last year, resulting in the emergence of several EigenLayer-based platforms in 2024. Currently, Puffer Finance ranks as the third-largest liquid restaking protocol by total value locked (TVL), following Ether.Fi and Renzo, with a TVL of $1.17 billion compared to Ether.Fi’s $3.5 billion and Renzo’s $2.95 billion.
With the Series A funding secured, Puffer Finance aims to launch its mainnet, which is anticipated to broaden validator participation within Ethereum’s ecosystem and bolster its decentralization. By setting a new standard for innovation in the liquid restaking landscape, Puffer’s mainnet aims to reduce the entry requirement to just 1 ETH for validators and enhance their earnings through the integration of Ethereum’s proof of staking with Actively Validated Services’ (AVS’) restaking yields.
Puffer has previously received a grant worth $120,000 from the Ethereum Foundation for its open-source tool called Secure-Signer, which helps Ethereum validators mitigate the risk of slashing or penalties.
Avichal Garg, co-founder and general partner at Electric Capital, praised Puffer’s technology for lowering entry barriers and enhancing security measures, thereby ensuring broader participation and strengthening network integrity. Similarly, Peter Johnson, co-head of venture at Brevan Howard Digital, commended Puffer Finance for building critical infrastructure that enhances Ethereum’s decentralization and security, emphasizing their commitment to supporting projects pivotal to the blockchain ecosystem’s growth and resilience.
