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Dubai, UAE, April 23rd, 2025, Chainwire

Funding round led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and over 100 angels across industry-leading teams such as Aave, Polygon, and StarkWare.

• Proof-of-Stake has become the dominant standard for blockchains, with Symbiotic unlocking new revenue streams for stakers across multiple networks simultaneously.
• Top investors and teams are backing Symbiotic's vision to transform staking from an isolated, single-network security mechanism into a universal coordination layer.
• Leading projects, including Hyperlane, Spark, and Avail, are among the first adopters, with 14 networks already integrated and 20+ more in the pipeline.

Symbiotic, the universal staking protocol, today announced a $29 million Series A funding round to launch the Universal Staking Framework, designed to expand blockchain security into broader economic coordination. The round was led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and more than 100 angel investors, including prominent contributors from Aave, Polygon, and StarkWare. The investment will be used to expand Symbiotic’s team and ecosystem, accelerate integrations with additional networks through tools such as SDKs, and support new functionality across slashing, cross-chain collateral composition, and risk modeling.

This milestone follows rapid growth since Symbiotic’s launch in June of last year, reaching over $1 billion in TVL faster than any other protocol from its initial launch. Live with 14 networks, Symbiotic is expanding to more than 35, with additional networks at various stages of integration—including Hyperlane, Spark, and Avail. The protocol also introduced the first restaking system with customizable slashing capabilities in January, establishing a new benchmark for protocol-level security.

Universal Staking builds on the capital efficiency introduced by restaking but dramatically expands its scope. Rather than focusing solely on shared security, Symbiotic enables any combination of assets to secure any class of network—modular or monolithic, L1 or L2—while supporting use cases that extend well beyond traditional staking, including insurance and other financial products.

"Restaking solved a key problem around capital efficiency in blockchain security—but it came with fixed assumptions," said Misha Putiatin, co-founder of Symbiotic. "Universal Staking breaks that mold. We’ve created a modular framework that lets protocols evolve security models over time while efficiently coordinating risk. This empowers protocols at every stage of their lifecycle to evolve their security models seamlessly without rebuilding infrastructure."

Major players in the interoperability and modular blockchain ecosystem are now building with Symbiotic. Hyperlane, a permissionless interoperability protocol, is working with Symbiotic to introduce native staking for its token — allowing the protocol to secure its network with a decentralized validator set backed by cryptoeconomic guarantees. This collaboration brings programmable security to Hyperlane’s modular architecture, helping ensure its cross-chain messaging routes remain trust-minimized and censorship-resistant.

In addition to improving security, insurance primitives backed by diverse collateral are currently in development, and structured risk products are being designed to layer staking positions for enhanced capital efficiency and more granular risk exposure.

“We see Universal Staking as the next step in blockchain infrastructure,” said Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera Capital. “Symbiotic unlocks economic coordination between assets and networks that were previously impossible. As the number and variety of onchain assets continue to increase, Symbiotic allows them to easily serve as economic security while enabling entirely new use cases across DeFi.”

Symbiotic’s expansion comes amid rapid growth in the broader staking and crypto ecosystem. As of February 2025, over 33.8 million ETH are staked, representing approximately 28.36% of the total ETH supply. Meanwhile, the total cryptocurrency market capitalization surged to $3.9 trillion in 2024, marking a 127% Y-on-Y growth and reflecting renewed interest in infrastructure-level innovations like staking, restaking, and asset coordination.

For more information about Symbiotic and Universal Staking, users can visit https://symbiotic.fi/.

About Symbiotic

Symbiotic is a universal staking protocol that provides a modular coordination framework for the blockchain ecosystem. It enables protocols to evolve their security models over time and unlock entirely new economic primitives. Backed by Paradigm, Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, cyberFund, and over 100 angel investors, Symbiotic is currently live on 14 networks and expanding to a total of 35, with additional networks in various stages of integration. For more, users can visit https://symbiotic.fi.

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