Delegate Labs, the team behind security protocol Delegate, today announced the closing of a $9 million seed round with backers including Electric Capital, Arca, Variant, and Arrington Capital.
The funds will partially back the team’s latest protocol, Clusters, also announced today. Clusters is a cross-chain, multi-wallet name service aimed at tackling crypto’s fragmentation issues that arise when users want to transact between wallets on various sprawling networks.
“We’re the first ones to be compatible with everything—we bring it all together and make it safe,” Delegate Labs founder Foobar told Fortune. “But more importantly, we make it easy to use.”
Many users have multiple wallets for various purposes, often scattered across incompatible blockchains, and the Web3 ecosystem should be built around this understanding, Foobar continued. “It shouldn’t matter what chain you’re interacting from.”
Whether users are trading cryptocurrencies, gaming, or holding NFTs, Clusters proposes to help aggregate assets in a single place. To do this, the team has utilized back-end bridges, partnering with interoperability protocol LayerZero. “They’ve got the largest bug bounty in the world—$15 million—and a flawless track record so far,” Foobar added.
Delegate Labs launched its first protocol, Delegate, in 2022 to protect on-chain assets by linking cold and hot wallets. Cold wallets refer to devices that store cryptocurrency offline and are accessed with private keys; hot alternatives remain online. By connecting the two, Delegate allows users to secure their on-chain identities, harnessing the interoperability to work like a “crypto power of attorney,” Foobar told Fortune.
Since its launch, according to a company statement, the Delegate protocol has connected over 180,000 wallets from retail users and institutions, holding $900 million worth of assets.
Whereas Delegate is a security-focused protocol, Clusters is user-profile focused, building on Delegate’s safety-through-interoperability mechanism. Whether users opt for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, or Layer 2s, the idea is that they can now “cluster” their addresses into one identity.
“We are excited to support them on their journey to make cross-chain interactions super simple, abstracting away cumbersome wallet interactions that we have today and paving the way to onboard the next wave of participants to the ownership economy,” Michael Arrington, founder of Arrington Capital, said in a statement.
