PANews reported on May 7 that Botanix Labs announced that it had raised $11.5 million in funding, with participation from institutions such as Polychain Capital, Placeholder Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and ABCDE. Other investors include Andrew Kang, Fiskantes, Dan Held, The Crypto Dog, Charlie Spears, Altcoin Sherpa, Dovey Wan, Jebus, Icebergy, Crypto ISO, Davis (aka "KarbonBased"), Walt Smith, and Domo, the creator of the BRC-20 token standard.
Botanix Labs has been building Spiderchain technology to secure decentralized, Bitcoin-based financial systems since 2022. Botanix Labs launched an early testnet version of the EVM Layer 2 protocol in November 2023. To date, the testnet has attracted over 200,000 active addresses, over 10,000 experimental token issuances, and dozens of dApps ready to launch when Spiderchain's first mainnet version is released.
Spiderchain's architecture allows applications and smart contracts running on any layer of Ethereum to be copied and run natively on Bitcoin in minutes. Users can also send Bitcoin directly from their Coinbase account or mining pool wallet to tools such as MetaMask without using wrapped assets and without leaving the Bitcoin network. The protocol gets its name from how it uses a series of randomized, decentralized multi-signatures to protect funds moving from the Bitcoin base layer, which resemble a spider web.
