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Funding the New Decentralized Internet

The internet is broken—hacking, tracking, passwords, and middlemen are all a threat to our freedom and safety on the internet.

Now more than ever, it’s clear we need a new internet—one that gives the power back to the users and puts security and freedom at the forefront of the architectural design.

Building a new internet is going to require a lot of effort from a large community of open-source developers. We’re excited to tell you that we’ve raised new funding to fuel the development of the Blockstack open-source software and contribute to making the new decentralized internet a reality.

The Blockstack Story

Blockstack started off with a decentralized identity system putting users in control. Since then, Blockstack has expanded into a full platform for decentralized applications, providing services beyond just identity, including DNS/naming, storage and authentication. These are all critical components of the new internet.

All of the Blockstack software is open source and is maintained by the Blockstack community. Our community is over 4000 members strong and over 70,000 domain names have been registered on Blockstack to date.

New Funding

Today we’re announcing that Blockstack Inc, an organization formed to push the Blockstack protocol forward, has raised funding to contribute more resources to the Blockstack open source community.

The round of $4M was led by Union Square Ventures, with participation by Lux Capital, Naval Ravikant, Digital Currency Group, Compound, Version One, Kal Vepuri and Rising Tide.

This is a huge vote of confidence for the new decentralized internet. These investors share our vision and we’re proud to be able to partner with them.

What’s Next

The Blockstack community is working towards the release of a new browser and app development platform that will allow anyone to use the new decentralized internet and the apps that are built on it.

Our new funding round will allow us to expand our team and contribute more development resources to the Blockstack open source project.

We believe the dream of building a truly decentralized internet is now within reach. We’re grateful for the support and enthusiasm of the Blockstack community and are looking forward to building upon the existing momentum.

If you share our vision of fixing the internet, come join our community and consider joining our team full time.

Ryan & Muneeb

Ryan & Muneeb

Muneeb Ali is a distributed systems PhD from Princeton and gives guest lectures on cloud computing there. He went through Y Combinator and was awarded a J. William Fulbright Fellowship.

Before Blockstack, Ryan Shea co-founded a software-as-a-service startup called GraphMuse and worked in an operations role for OmniActive Health Technologies. He received a degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University with a minor in Computer Science.