cointelegraph.com
Immutable, a Layer-2 non-fungible token (NFT) protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain, has announced a $60 million Series B funding raise from a multitude of corporate venture firms, including Sam Bankman Fried’s Alameda Research and Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerFund.
The funding round was co-led by gaming investment platform BITKRAFT Ventures and venture firm King River Capital. The new capital would be allocated to supporting Immutable’s growing ambitions, including expanding the global engineering and sales departments, fostering industry partnerships, as well as scaling the network's native NFT gaming projects.
Through its scaling solution Immutable X, the protocol providesa foundational infrastructure for the global business market to distribute and exchange NFT digital assets on the Ethereum ecosystem.
In 2019, the platform was responsible for supporting the launch of the blockchain-based trading card game Gods Unchained. The native ERC-20 token $GODS acte as the medium of value with the game's ecosystem.
Immutable X is an NFT-dedicated blockchain protocol that claims to allow 9,000 transactions per second for ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens, near-instant transactions, zero gas fees and greater scaling capabilities through the utilization of StarkWare's ZK-rollup, all whilst sustaining carbon neutrality.
Related: Ethereum layer-twos reportedly processing more transactions than Bitcoin
The co-founder of Immutable, Robbie Ferguson, believes that the NFT trading experience has the potential to improve from the state of its current offering:
"It’s expensive, illiquid, and the only existing scaling solutions compromise on the most important thing - the security and user-base of Ethereum. We want businesses to create their game, marketplace, or NFT application within hours via APIs, with a mainstream user experience. No blockchain programming required.”
Utilizing zero-knowledge proofs — a method of anonymizing transactions — the protocol offsets its carbon footprint by bulking mint and trading activity into a compressed validity proof which is then re-uploaded to the original blockchain. This procedure requires less gas, in turn, less energy consumption.
4/ Example, historically on L1, minting 8 million @GodsUnchained cards on Ethereum would consume approximately 490 million kWh.
— Immutable (@Immutable) March 31, 2021
On Immutable X, we’ve minted 8 million NFT cards with only ~1,030kWh = 844 kg CO2. That’s 475,000x less energy consumption.
With a tweet thread, the protocol also added context to the data: “To put this [the carbon figure of 844kg CO2] in perspective, a one-way flight from LAX to NYC is 807 kWh = 662 kg CO2.”
By purchasing carbon credits — an industry certification permitting carbon emission up to a certain limit — the protocol is working on their environmental initiative by pledging to neutralize the carbon output of any NFT asset, marketplace or game built upon their platform.