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April 23, 2025 – Symbiotic, the universal staking framework, today announced it has secured $29 million in Series A funding led by Pantera Capital, with significant participation from Coinbase Ventures and over 100 angel investors from leading teams including Aave, Polygon, and StarkWare. This investment propels Symbiotic's vision beyond traditional restaking toward "Universal Staking," a comprehensive coordination layer transforming how blockchains approach security and economic alignment. This follows a $5.8 million seed round in June 2024, bringing the total funds raised to $34.8 million.
Symbiotic has experienced rapid growth since its mainnet launch in January 2025, achieving over $1 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL) faster than any other protocol at the time, peaking at $2.7 billion in December 2024. With 14 networks already live and over 35 in various integration stages, including Hyperlane, Spark, and Avail, Symbiotic is quickly becoming the go-to platform for decentralized coordination.
Universal Staking expands upon the capital efficiency of restaking by creating a modular framework for cryptoeconomic coordination. It enables flexible economic alignment throughout a protocol's entire lifecycle, going beyond simply sharing security between networks. This adaptability is crucial in the rapidly evolving blockchain landscape.
"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.”
The Series A funding will be used to:
- Expand the Team and Ecosystem: Grow the core team and support structures to meet increasing network demand.
- Enhance SDKs and Tooling: Streamline integrations for the 20+ networks currently in the pipeline.
- Extend Functionality: Develop new features across slashing mechanisms, cross-chain collateral composition, and risk modeling to enable new economic primitives.
- Decentralized Insurance: Creating coverage backed by diverse collateral.
- Incentive Alignment: Aligning incentives between protocols and complementary networks.
- Sophisticated Tranches: Layering different collateral types for innovative staking finance approaches.
“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.”
About Symbiotic:
Symbiotic is a universal staking protocol offering a modular coordination framework for the blockchain ecosystem. It enables protocols to evolve their security models and unlock new economic primitives. Backed by Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and over 100 angel investors, Symbiotic is live on multiple networks and rapidly expanding. For more information, visit https://symbiotic.fi/.
About Pantera Capital
Pantera Capital is the first U.S. institutional asset manager focused exclusively on blockchain technology and digital assets. Founded in 2003 by Dan Morehead, the firm launched the first U.S. blockchain hedge and venture funds in 2013 and has since grown into one of the world’s largest digital‐asset investment managers with over $5 billion in assets under management as of 2025. Headquartered on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, Pantera offers private equity, venture capital, and hedge fund strategies across the crypto ecosystem, backing protocols, infrastructure projects, and digital‐asset companies.
About Coinbase Ventures
Coinbase Ventures is the corporate‑venture capital arm of Coinbase, established in April 2018 to invest in early‑stage companies building the crypto‑ and Web3 ecosystem. It partners with founders across all layers of the cryptoeconomy—layer‑1 protocols, DeFi infrastructure, NFTs, wallets, exchanges, tooling, and more—and provides capital along with strategic support, distribution channels, and operational expertise. Based in San Francisco, Coinbase Ventures has deployed capital into hundreds of startups globally, aligning its investments with Coinbase’s broader mission of creating more economic freedom for the world.
Compiled by CMO Intern team
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