Bitcoin may have been languishing around $42,000 for weeks but crypto projects sure aren’t having trouble raising money.

Stader Labs and Aleph.im both announced on Thursday (Friday, Australia time) that they’d raised millions from institutional investors.

Paris-based Aleph.im, a cross-blockchain decentralised storage and computing network, said it had raised US$10 million in a round led by Stratos Technologies.

Other participants included Zeeprime, NOIA Capital, Theia, Bitfwd Capital, Ellipti, Incuba Alpha, RareStone, TRGC, Chris McCann and Owen Simonin.

The project is working to become a decentralised, Web3.0 competitor to Amazon Lambda, a serverless computing platform that’s part of Amazon Web Services.

Adeph has 70 nodes already being used by Solana, Ubisoft, Polygon, Request Network and Neon Labs, but this funding round will let it offer minimum wage payments to over 150 compute node operators. Some of the investors also committed to provide infrastructure to support the network as part of the funding round.

“This round of funding is a key piece in executing our broader vision for Aleph.im,” said founder Jonathan Schemoul.

“In addition to the immediate rollout of the network’s compute nodes, this year will also bring the activation of Aleph.im storage nodes, meaning the network will be capable of both decentralised processing and decentralised storage.

“This will enable Web3 builders, Dapps and protocols to fully decentralize up to the last piece of their  development stack.”
 

Stader Labs raises $12.5m

Meanwhile, Bangalore-based Stader Labs has raised $12.5 million in a strategic round led by Three Arrows Capital that values the staking platform at up to $450 million.

Other investors included Blockchain.com, Accomplice, Australia-founded Digital Asset Capital Management, GoldenTree Asset Management, Accel, Amber, 4RC, Figment, and angel investors including FalcolnX cofounder Prabhakar Reddy and Anchor Protocol general manager Matt Cantieri.

“This capital will be strategically deployed to accelerate our cross-chain expansion, as well as to nurture our growing ecosystem of third-parties developing staking applications with decentralised Stader infrastructure,” said Stader Labs chief executive Amitej Gajjala.

The platform makes it easy for delegators to stake with a basket of validators, helping proof-of-stake networks decentralise.

Stader is currently live on the Terra ecosystem, with nearly US$500 million in total value locked (TVL) across 15,000 wallets since its launch in November.

“These numbers underscore both Stader’s early traction and the broader market opportunity in staking infrastructure,” said Kyle Davies of Three Arrows Capital.

Stader expects to soon expand to Solana, Ethereum, Fantom, Hedera, and Polygon.