OAK Network, the Web 3.0 hub for Defi and payment automation, closed a $5.5M Seed round led by Foundation Capital, Greylock, and Hypersphere Ventures. Other notable participants in the funding round include Electric Capital, Monday Capital, GSR, Shima Capital, Blockwall Digital, and angel investors.
OAK Network’s innovation, the event-driven transaction, allows users to create bespoke on-chain automation not possible today. Incumbent “automation” solutions are not consumer-friendly, requiring coding knowledge, AWS servers, and private key delegation. OAK’s more powerful transaction shifts the paradigm of automation from centralized servers to the blockchain. With OAK, users are empowered to schedule future and recurring payments, engage in trustless auto-trading, and place decentralized limit and stop-loss orders on AMM DEXs all without smart contract middlemen or compromising the security of a user’s wallet.
OAK’s team scaled up to 10 full-time employees in the U.S. and China.
The OAK Network team received an open grant from the Web3 Foundation in May 2021, and won the 1st prize in the Polkadot hackathon in July. The team has developed a working proof of concept of the event registry on top of Parity’s Substrate open source framework. OAK Network’s chains are natively compatible with Polkadot, and will be integrated with Kusama and Polkadot as parachains through crowdloan auctions. The networks and timelines are,
Neumann Network, a parachain testnet that has been operating since June 2021.
Turing Network, a Kusama parachain to launch in Q2 2022.
OAK Network, a Polkadot parachain to launch in Q4 2022.
“The reason we chose Polkadot is because it has solved many critical problems of Ethereum. The blockchain comes with out-of-the-box solutions such as staking, DAO governance and inter-chain communication. The adoption of Polkadot will take time but technologically, many constraints have been lifted for us to develop the next generation blockchains.” says Chris Li, co-founder and CEO.
“We’re a team of utilitarian builders. We’re driven by the vision that in an increasingly decentralized world, there is a great need for automation to be seamless, trustless and secure for consumers of all generations.” — Irsal McGinnis, co-founder and CTO.
Ultimately, OAK Network will bridge to and facilitate other major blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. The team is actively working with academia to develop cutting-edge solutions for cross chain communication and on-chain automation privacy.
Stay tuned for further information about the OAK Network here on Medium, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as in our Discord Server!
Please check out our engineering and growth job openings, contact partner@oak.tech for partnerships, or contact@oak.tech for any general inquiries.
About Chris Li
Chris Li (LinkedIn) is the founder and CEO of Ava Protocol. Prior to establishing Ava Protocol, Chris gained valuable experience as a Messaging Protocol Engineer at Microsoft and as a successful serial entrepreneur. He is also a long-term EVM smart contract developer, Web3 Foundation grant recipient, and Polkadot core contributor.
