The team behind the Symbiotic Network, the leftover protocol intended to compete with Eigenlayer, shared on Wednesday that it had raised $ 29 million in a Serie A round.

The funding will expand the current team and contribute to the protocol’s Universal Stakeing Framework, which is expanding its efforts from just restoring to include support for other efforts activities.

“Instead of focusing solely on shared security, symbiotic enables any combination of assets to secure any class of networks – modular or monolithic, L1 or L2 – while supporting use cases that extend far beyond traditional stakeing, including insurance and other financial products,” the team divided into a press release.

Pantera Capital led the financing round, which also saw the participation of Coinbase Ventures and over 100 angel investors.

Restake is a way to use a blockchain to secure other apps. It became one of the biggest defi trends last year, when billions were poured into some leftover protocols of investors.

Eigenlayer was the biggest winner among the residues with the total value of Locked (Tvl), which rose as high as $ 20 billion at its peak before tumbling back to just over $ 7 billion recently, according to Defillama Data. However, Egellayer is still the largest residual protocol that sets the project at the intersection of rival startups like Symbiotic. Currently, Tvl is hovering for all leftovers protocols around $ 14 billion.

Start -up to compete with a giant

Symbiotic came to the stage in 2024 with the support of Lido’s co-founders and Crypto-Venturefirma paradigm, as an alternative to re-consuming protocol leglayer. Currently, the network has about $ 825 million in Tvl and puts it in third place among remnant peers, according to Defillama.

The network allows decentralized applications, also known as actively validated services (AVS), to collectively secure each other. Users can then restore their crypto assets, which they have deposited in other protocols to help secure these AVSs and accumulate a kind of reward that extract more dividends or earn points. However, the symbiotic differs from Eigenlayer because it allows users to deposit any Ethereum ERC-20 token in the protocol while Eigenlayer just takes ETH.

With the new financing round that gives symbiotic ability to expand beyond restoring, the start -up is looking to change the way investors perceive the industry as a whole.

“We are building infrastructure and our job is to improve it by a huge margin,” said Misha Putiatin, co -founder of SymbioticAt to Coindesk in an interview.

Putiatin added that they make this shift to explain new protocols “coming on board or as in an active pipeline,” which is not interested in re -taking. “They will not share their safety, they will build their own safety vertical and their own adjustment, just by using us.”

Read more: Lido-co-founders, Paradigm Sectionly Back Eigenlayer competitor as Defi Battle Line’s form