ArkStream Capital: Investing in Caldera Aims to Drive Core Infrastructure in the New Cycle
Date: July 25, 2024
ArkStream Capital is pleased to announce the completion of Series A funding for @Calderaxyz , marking a key step in our strategic deployment within the modular blockchain and RaaS (Runtime as a Service) sectors. This funding round, raising $15 million, saw significant support from high-profile investment firms, including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, DragonFly, and Sequoia Capital, alongside ArkStream.
ArkStream Capital firmly believes that the development and expansion of Layer 2 solutions, whether they are generic or application-specific Rollups, represent an irreversible trend. This trend is driven by the widespread adoption of modular blockchain concepts, which intensify competition for blockchain space by dApps, optimize transaction costs for end-users, and create an urgent need for token economy customization. Therefore, the demand for services and products offered by the RaaS sector is strong and is fostering a new industry cycle where RaaS could become a core infrastructure similar to AWS in cloud computing.
This investment in Caldera reflects ArkStream’s deep commitment and high expectations for the modular blockchain RaaS space. We look forward to working closely with Caldera to continually drive innovation and development in blockchain technology.
The Rise of the RaaS Sector
The RaaS sector aligns closely with the concept of modular blockchains, driving the practical implementation and progress of modular blockchain technologies. The emergence of RaaS not only provides stable RPC and a range of customized services for leading generic Rollups but also makes it easier for more dApps to upgrade to application-specific Rollups. Hence, the RaaS sector harbors vast market potential and, given the deep understanding required of various modular blockchain technology stacks, has become a highly technical and barrier-rich field.
Robust Products and Services
As a high-performance, customizable Rollup deployment platform, Caldera integrates frameworks like Arbitrum Nitro, Optimism Bedrock, zkSync ZK Stack, and Polygon CDK, enabling developers to rapidly deploy either generic or application-specific Rollups. Moreover, Caldera offers Rollup projects a variety of flexible options, including shared and decentralized sequencer solutions, alternative data availability layers that cost less than Ethereum (such as Celestia, EigenDA, and NearDA), account abstraction, customized Rollup token pricing, and tailor-made block explorers, data indexers, and bridge interfaces. These extensive features stem from Caldera’s deep collaborations with well-known industry projects such as Alchemy, Goldsky, Celestia, and Eigenlayer. In terms of performance and availability, Caldera not only hosts the entire RPC service but also provides real-time monitoring, scalable solutions, and 24/7 support.
Promising Metalayer
While the proliferation of Rollups has made significant progress, it has also led to noticeable issues such as liquidity fragmentation, data silos, lack of composability in Layer 1 dApps, and increased UI/UX complexity. To address these issues, a unified layer connecting multiple Rollups is seen as an effective solution. Consequently, renowned teams like Polygon launched AggLayer this year, and zkSync introduced Elastic Chain. In contrast, from a RaaS platform perspective, Caldera has proposed the promising Metalayer solution, based on a profound understanding of Rollup projects, aimed at simplifying user experience, enhancing connectivity between Rollups, and optimizing developers’ workflows across multiple Rollups.
Mature Business Model and Exceptional Customer Data
The business model of the RaaS sector is similar to SaaS, focusing on products and services whose ultimate value is reflected in the data of B2B customers. Notably, Caldera has achieved significant success in the RaaS field through its reliable products and comprehensive services. Currently, Caldera serves over 50 Web3 clients, including Manta, Treasure, ApeCoin, Injective, and Plume, covering key players in the Rollup domain, with customer numbers still growing.
Excellent Team Execution
Caldera’s founding team has shown outstanding vitality and market acuity, as well as excellent product iteration and delivery capabilities. Despite early Rollup technologies not being widely recognized, Caldera keenly anticipated the future potential of Rollups and the vast opportunities in the RaaS sector. Over the past two years, they have successfully integrated various modular blockchain frameworks and provided nearly perfect customer data. These achievements fully demonstrate the team’s exceptional capabilities in product development and market insight.
Conclusion
Just as AWS radically transformed the cloud computing sector and OpenAI’s ChatGPT ushered in a new era for large language model applications, Caldera is pioneering a new epoch for the widespread adoption of RaaS. We firmly believe that as a core infrastructure, Caldera and its Metalayer will grow into an industry unicorn bridging Web3 and Web2. It will not only provide critical support for Web3 and Web2 dApps, facilitating the upgrade of more Web3 dApps to the next-generation application Rollups, but also assist Web2 projects in smoothly transitioning into the blockchain industry, attracting and onboarding more crypto users!
ArkStream Capital is a venture capital firm specializing in early-stage investments in Web3 unicorns.
Founded by crypto experts with pedigrees from MIT, Stanford, Tencent, Google, and BlackRock, ArkStream leverages eight years of deep Web3 expertise to drive the zero-to-one growth of its portfolio companies.
ArkStream Capital is managing a portfolio of over 100 companies, including Aave, Flow, Sei, Manta, Fhenix, Merlin, Particle Network, and Space and Time.
