RISE, the Gigagas Layer 2, has raised a seed round of $3.2 million. The round was finalized last month, and is led by Finality Capital with participation from Orange DAO, DACM, ether.fi Ventures, P2 Ventures*, MH Ventures and Public Works. Angel investors include Vitalik Buterin, Stani Kulechov, Anthony Sassano aka sassal.eth, and DCF God as well as several prominent web3 founders.

RISE moves beyond the limitations of Megagas performance to surpass 1 billion gas per second, marking the beginning of the Gigagas Era. This breakthrough has far reaching implications for multiple sectors, including DeFi, DePIN, gaming and social networks, opening up new possibilities for web3 apps. 

RISE was founded by veteran web3 builders Sam Battenally, Hai Nguyen and Sasha Mai; and incubated by Caliber Venture Builder, a venture studio founded by Loi Luu. RISE has been in development since 2023, inspired by the desire to provide a significantly better solution to the scalability problem. 

The key efforts to unlock the RISE stack include execution and state access optimizations to maximize throughput and minimize latency. On the execution front, RISE has developed and open-sourced pevm, a Parallel EVM engine which is the fastest public EVM executor in the market and set to be integrated into Reth. The RISE Stack also features a Continuous Block Pipeline, which ensures full CPU utilization with no idle time by continuously executing L2 transactions while waiting for L1 consensus. RISE tackles state access with a Versioned Merkle Tree to minimize disk compaction; and a delta-encoded log-structured database, RiseDB, to minimize state access complexity.

RISE prioritizes Ethereum alignment and decentralization. With its optimized database and state access methods, RISE expects full node operation to run efficiently with 32 Gigabytes of RAM. RISE also plans to implement Based Sequencing next year, a decentralized approach to Layer 2 block sequencing.

The RISE internal testnet is ready for developers to start building high performance applications. The RISE team is excited to welcome builders to get involved and join the Gigagas Era. Builders can contact the team via the website.

*P2 Ventures is formerly Polygon Ventures

Contact: [email protected]

About RISE: RISE is the Gigagas Layer 2, aiming to unlock a new generation of Gigagas applications. The RISE stack offers throughput in excess of 1 billion gas per second; it’s able to achieve this stepwise technology improvement by tackling execution and state access, including pevm - the fastest public EVM execution engine, Continuous Execution, Versioned Merkle Tree, and RiseDB. The future of Web3 will be built on RISE.