Financing News丨Web3 content protocol RSS3 completes a new round of financing, led by CoinShares

On December 22, RSS3, a next-generation protocol for building decentralized web feeds for cross-blockchain content distribution, announced a new round of financing. RSS3 indexes and connects all our web presence in the Web3 era, and is committed to realizing the vision of platform-free media and applications.

In the traditional Web architecture, RSS is a protocol standard that allows applications to access updates from websites in a standardized format. It allows users to track many different websites in a single aggregator without having to manually check each website.

In the Web3 architecture, there is no feed to receive updated information, and users must check sites individually. In addition, more and more data is being migrated across chains, requiring complex and tedious work on behalf of users and application developers to collect data from each chain and its native wallets, blockchain browsers, and applications to collect new information and track updates. RSS3 aggregates all of this data into a single feed, making it easy for Web3 developers and users to track many different networks, assets, and events in one feed.

The world’s 50 million content creators have generated a $100 billion online content market on the existing Internet, and the Web3 content economy is expected to contain even greater potential given its encrypted and platform-free nature.

The round was led by CoinShares Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, Mask Network, HashKey Group, Fabric Ventures, Arweave, Dapper Labs, Avalanche Asia Star Fund, Youbi Capital, Headline VC, Formless Capital, imToken Ventures, and other private equity investors including Balaji Srinivasan, The Jiho, and Miss ₿itcoin.

Meltem Demirors, Principal at CoinShares Ventures, commented: “We have been creating assets online since the early days of the internet. With over 4 billion internet users and 50 million online creators, these assets have huge potential to be financialized and represented on-chain through new crypto primitives. RSS3 enables the future of these assets to become ‘platform-less’ - minimizing the monopoly of web2 platforms over user behavior and enabling aggregation in applications and a variety of new use cases such as online credentials, authentication, and more.”

RSS3 team members from all over the world have extensive experience. Since its launch two months ago, RSS3 has indexed 18,000 users, 76,000 links, and 834,000 assets, while integrating multiple blockchains, including second-layer blockchains and cross-chain bridges. The RSS3 protocol now supports assets, NTFs, events, and content from many centralized and decentralized networks, including Ethereum, Mirror.xyz, Arweave, Polygon, xDai, and Twitter, and is supporting Flow, Ronin, Solana, and Avalanche.

While RSS3’s predecessor, the RSS protocol, has been battling a centralized and restrictive platform-driven approach to the web led by giants like Twitter, Facebook, and Tiktok, the RSS3 team is excited to build a future where cyberspace is open, decentralized, and permissionless, just like the early days of the internet.

The team will use the funds to develop decentralized RSS3 nodes and attract more developers to build different applications.

The RSS3 team commented: “Our generation saw the Internet when we were kids, and we saw how trailblazers like Aaron Swartz fought for information freedom – now it’s time for us to pick up the baton.”