According to Blockworks, this week, two protocols related to re-staking, Aligned Layer and Othentic, announced the completion of financing. Aligned Layer announced a $20 million Series A financing led by Hack VC, which also attracted some small crypto-focused venture capital firms to participate. Aligned Layer plans to launch as an active verification service (AVS) on EigenLayer. AVS is a product protected by EigenLayer's re-staking, which is a way to use pledged Ethereum for purposes other than protecting Ethereum, thereby extracting an additional layer of use from the capital that provides Ethereum security. Aligned Layer is an EigenLayer protection protocol for verifying zero-knowledge proofs, hoping to make zero-knowledge proof verification cheaper. In addition, Othentic announced a $4 million seed round of financing led by Finality and Breyer Capital. Othentic provides a software stack to help AVS developers start a distributed system based on EigenLayer's shared security model.
