Fuel Labs Announces $80 Million of Support for the Fastest Modular Execution Layer

With over 60 engineers, Fuel Labs eyes a blockchain with maximum security and the highest flexible throughput for the Ethereum ecosystem.

Fuel Labs today announced $80M USD of support led by Blockchain Capital and Stratos, with additional support from Alameda Research, CoinFund, Bain Capital Crypto, TRGC, Maven 11 Capital, Blockwall, Spartan, Dialectic, and ZMT. This marks a major milestone for modular execution layers in the blockchain community.

There is an ongoing and significant shift happening in layer-1 (L1) blockchain architecture. The industry is moving away from a monolithic design—where consensus, data availability, and execution are tightly coupled—to a modular future, where execution is separated from data availability and consensus. The separation allows for specialization at each layer, delivering a significant increase in both bandwidth and execution capacity across the stack.

Fuel demonstrates that developing new monolithic L1s in 2022 is short-sighted and that building high performance execution layers on top of modular blockchains can produce extremely high throughput with incredible Ethereum-grade security guarantees. Moreover, Fuel includes fraud-provable trust-minimized light clients which deliver better security and decentralization guarantees in addition to trust-minimized liquidity bridging, which is not possible between any two L1s.

Furthermore, layer-2s (L2s) do not solve the scalability crisis either. Although L2s have opened up a margin of cost reduction for access to the Ethereum ecosystem, the total throughput increase has been modest. L2s have failed to keep costs low. The industry needs change that not only reduces waste and inefficiency, but opens up new kinds of use cases to birth the next generation of Defi. Fuel aims to resolve this by designing execution for the modular stack, namely, L1s with high bandwidth potential which features new styles of execution.

“Fuel is designed specifically to leverage additional bandwidth in ways no other scalability system can. Fuel is the fastest execution layer for the modular blockchain stack, delivering the highest security and flexible throughput,” says Nick Dodson, Co-Founder of Fuel Labs. “Fuel defines a modular execution layer as: a verifiable computation system designed for the modular blockchain stack. Fuel specializes in making execution as efficient as possible.”

“Our vision is to build the engine for the autonomous future, powering the next generation of independent human coordination and cooperation,” says John Adler, Co-Founder of Fuel Labs. “Sway was specifically designed to empower blockchain developers with the richest features and best possible developer experience. With Fuel, we can now go beyond monolithic.”

There are three central pillars to Fuel’s technology stack:

1. Parallel transaction execution. More compute. More state access.
2. The Fuel Virtual Machine (FuelVM). Less waste. More flexibility.
3. A superior developer experience (with Sway and Forc). Powerful. Sleek.

Fuel v1 began as a L2 scalability technology for a monolithic Ethereum. It was the first optimistic rollup on mainnet Ethereum, deployed at the end of 2020. The project has grown significantly since its humble inception, now boasting more than 60 of the best and brightest engineers, and support from some of the best blockchain firms and industry leaders.

About Fuel Labs

Fuel Labs is a global decentralized group of passionate developers building the future of blockchain scalability technology. As the leader in blockchain scaling innovation, its engineers created the optimistic rollup design paradigm and have contributed to advancing the frontier of rollup, blockchain virtual machine, and safe smart contract programming language research. Fuel Labs deployed the first-ever optimistic rollup to mainnet Ethereum in 2020.

Press Contact:

Ekram Ahmed

ekram@3ekv.com