Mash, a Lightning network startup, has announced raising $6 million in seed funding. Expanding its team across different fields such as engineering, marketing, sales, and business development also remains an area of focus in addition to executing its go-to-market strategy.
seed tower
According to the official blog, the investment round was co-led by Castle Island Ventures and Whitecap Venture Partners, while other participants were Maple VC, Strategic Cyber Ventures, Aquanow and Spacecadet Ventures. Several angel investors such as Amjad Masad, Balaji Srinivasan, Austin Hill, John Pfeffer and Dean Skurka also participated.
Following the development, Jared Nusinoff, founder and CEO of Mash, said that Bitcoin and LN offer the opportunity to transform “the fabric of all online experiences” and explore new business models that reward and incentivize.
Nic Carter, general partner of Castle Island Ventures, who also led a pre-seed investment in Mash, will join the startup’s board. In a statement, the popular Bitcoin proponent said:
“Online content monetization is deeply broken today. As a scalable, data-efficient, and high-granularity system, Bitcoin’s Lightning Network is uniquely suited to solving this problem, and Mash employs it wonderfully. We’ve redoubled our commitment to Mash and look forward to continuing the journey with the team.”
Russell Samuels, a partner at Whitecap Venture Partners, will also join Mash’s board as a board observer.
Founded in 2021, Mash recently released a beta version of its first product that allows web applications as well as creators to charge based on access/usage. It also enables the addition of a consumer digital wallet with a snippet of code. The company is currently in the process of onboarding several partners.
Growing Lightning Network Capacity
Since its implementation in the Bitcoin mainnet in 2018, the Lightning Network has continued to maintain an upward trajectory. Unaffected by the ongoing bear market, its capacity hit an all-time high of over 3,949 BTC this week, according to data from Bitcoin Visuals showing that the Layer 2 architecture continued to increase transaction speeds while dramatically reducing expenses.
Despite a minor disruption in April, LN has been growing in parallel to the cryptocurrency’s global adoption drive.
Further evidence of LN’s growing adoption is the integration of the Strike digital payment platform with Shopify to enable the latter’s merchants in the US to take advantage of the scaling solution. layer 2 for faster and cheaper bitcoin payments. Popular cryptocurrency payments provider, BitPay, has also announced the addition of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network to its platform.
