Swiss-based NEAR Foundation announced Nuffle Labs with €12.1M backing: Know more

Swiss-based NEAR Foundation, a non-profit that supports the governance and development of the NEAR protocol, on Thursday, announced the launch of an independent entity — Nuffle Labs, with $13M (approximately €12.1M) funding.

The funding for this project came from a strategic grant from the NEAR Foundation ($7M) and an investment led by Electric Capital.

Additional funding also came from Canonical Crypto, Fabric Ventures, Robot Ventures, Caladan, Lyrik Ventures, and angel investors, including Jordi Alexander from Selini, Bowen Wang from NEAR, Sreeram Kannan from EigenLayer, Sam Kazemian from Frax, and Sandeep Nailwal from Polygon.

Nuffle Labs: Enhancing NEAR’s modular product suite

Nuffle Labs is enhancing NEAR’s modular product suite, with a special focus on the NEAR Data Availability Layer (NEAR DA) and the NEAR Fast Finality Layer (NFFL).

NEAR Data Availability (DA) offers cost-effective and reliable data storage. RSS3, a NEAR DA user, saw its costs drop from $1,000 to $10 daily upon using the platform. NEAR DA’s throughput of 24MB/s outperforms competitors like Celestia. It supports various rollup types and provides cost efficiency, effortless validation, and user-friendly interaction.

NEAR DA is especially well suited for applicants that produce large information/data such as DePIN and AI.

The NEAR Fast Finality Layer (NFFL) is a service designed to speed up and secure block finality across different protocols. It integrates additional public layers into the blockchain stack, allowing for innovative cross-chain applications.

NEAR Foundation: What you need to know

The NEAR Foundation has developed the NEAR protocol, a high-performance carbon-neutral blockchain designed to be super-fast, incredibly secure, and infinitely scalable. The platform allows anyone to build at scale and deploy at pace. 

With 18M accounts and 550,000 members, the NEAR community is home to innovators, developers, and contributors supporting the protocol’s platform, ecosystem, and applications.

NEAR is backed by top VCs such as A16Z, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain.com, and Baidu Ventures.