Syndica, a Web 3.0 blockchain infrastructure company focused on the Solana ecosystem, has completed an $8 million Seed financing round co-led by Social Capital, Jump Capital, and Kindred Ventures, with participation from Alameda Research, Solana Ventures, CoinShares, 0x Labs, DeFiance Capital, Spartan Group, MGNR, Resolute VC, Untamed Ventures, Ryan Selkis of Messari, Joe McCann, and other angels.
Syndica is building the next generation of blockchain infrastructure for the Solana ecosystem. Projects lack scalable infrastructure to communicate between the blockchain and the applications themselves. This is the problem co-founder and CEO Ahmad Abbasi and his co-founder brother Danial Abbasi are looking to solve: Web 3.0 lacks the Cloud-like infrastructure that Web 2.0 used to scale to billions of users over the past two decades. Syndica provides this missing middle layer via “RPC nodes” that sit between the blockchain and decentralized applications (or DApps), allowing them to read and write data to the blockchain. In addition to the breakthroughs achieved in RPC node scalability, Syndica has a suite of features like advanced logging, audience and RPC usage analytics, and more that will provide developers with the tools and APIs they need to build better products. The team believes the opportunity is a large one: “The idea is to be the Cloud of Web 3.0,” says Danial Abbasi.
“Syndica has built impressive, robust technology that solves an acute pain point for many Solana ecosystem developers,” said Matthew Beck, Partner at Solana Ventures. “Easy access to scalable RPC node infrastructure and detailed logs improve the Web 3.0 developer experience, which is why we’re excited to back the team.”
The Syndica team chose to build on Solana because its speed and low cost of transactions give it the potential to be the first to bring one billion users on-chain. Apart from a staggering 200x appreciation in the price of $SOL over the last 18 months, Solana has also seen an explosion in developer and user interest. Over just the last eight weeks, the Solana website’s project showcase expanded from 302 production projects spanning 19 categories to 500 production projects spanning 25 categories today. Meanwhile, total staked assets in the Solana ecosystem have soared; for example, Saber Finance, an automated market-maker built on Solana, boasts over $1.5 billion in staked assets mere months since it launched on June 1st of this year. Solana’s tremendous scalability makes it attractive to developers, but also the most challenging blockchain for which to build infrastructure, which is why investors like Social Capital saw immense value in the technology Syndica built.
“Web 3.0 is ushering in a revolution of the internet, and developers are on the cutting edge of this change,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO of Social Capital. “Syndica is making it as easy to build in the Solana ecosystem as it is to build in Web 2.0, and we’re excited to support this journey.”
Seeing high demand, Syndica has capped its waitlist of beta clients, which includes several of the top projects in the Solana ecosystem, as well as several of the largest legacy financial services firms working to integrate with the Solana ecosystem.
“What excites us most is the opportunity to bring in the next generation of Web 3.0 developers by creating an experience that makes Web 2.0 developers feel at-home,” said Ahmad Abbasi, CEO. “We think that migration is a one trillion dollar opportunity, and we will play a central role in it.”
