Firewall Raises $3.7 Million To Take Smart Contracts Mainstream With Programmable Finality

March 7, 2024 – San Francisco, California

Firewall secures funding from North Island Ventures, Breyer Capital and Hack VC to bulletproof smart contract networks.

Firewall, a blockchain infrastructure startup, announced its $3.7 million pre-seed round, co-led by North Island Ventures, Breyer Capital and Hack VC.

Firewall transforms the usability of smart contract technology through an innovative finality consensus mechanism that eliminates smart contract exploits.

The founders of Firewall, previously the first and sixth employees at Staked – a staking company acquired by Kraken in a landmark crypto deal – have helped breathe life into the eras of PoS (proof-of-stake) and DeFi (decentralized finance) over the last six years.

In that time, the founders served institutional clients with infrastructure that handled billions of dollars, and now building on their experience, are addressing what most perceive as the final major hurdle to a full embrace of digital assets by the traditional financial system.

Devan Purhar, co-founder of Firewall, said,

“Firewall is building the safety rails that enable the everyday person to use the next era of the internet. Today, billions of dollars are stolen from users, through irreversible transactions that are classifiable as theft.

“There’s a parallel between the current state of crypto networks and the early internet, with a similar lack of essential security infrastructure.

“Our focus is not on marginal improvements – rather, we bring a required paradigm shift in the usability of blockchains. We designed a solution from first principles and created programmable finality. Fundamentally, we make exploits a concept of the past.”

Akin to a digital version of a traditional network’s firewall, Firewall’s technology introduces ‘programmable finality.’

It extends rollups to use programmable transaction finalization rules – which act as automated checkpoints that block harmful transactions – inserted before later stages when the data is finalized by a DA layer such as EigenDA or Celestia.

The founders envision Firewall as a part of every smart contract network, acting as an embedded security system that intelligently guards against threats.

Sam Mitchell, co-founder of Firewall, said,

“Firewall uses real-time algorithms to pre-filter exploits from being included in blocks. Then, by using programmable finality we automatically recover from any exploits that bypass the pre-filter checks….