$40 million financing, with participation from Vitalik Buterin, Etherealize aims to become the "spokesperson" for Ethereum

Original Title: "40 Million Financing, Vitalik Participates, Etherealize Wants to Be Ethereum's 'Spokesperson'"

Original Author: Eric, Foresight News

According to Fortune magazine on the evening of September 3rd (GMT+8), Etherealize has completed a $40 million financing round, led by Electric Capital and Paradigm, with participation from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation. Electric Capital and Paradigm have never hesitated to spend big in the Web3 space, especially within the Ethereum ecosystem, and both are major supporters of Ethereum DAT-listed companies. However, it is rare for both Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation to participate together.

Etherealize is very concise in its self-introduction, describing itself on X as an "institutional-grade product, BD, and marketing department for the Ethereum ecosystem," and its website only features the visions of "reshaping Wall Street" and "bringing the world to Ethereum through research, content, and products." In terms of products, Etherealize targets institutional-grade infrastructure, offering issuance, management, and settlement of tokenized assets, as well as corresponding automated compliance infrastructure, and plans to introduce privacy features through zero-knowledge proofs.

According to Etherealize, it has an engineering team with deep understanding of Ethereum, a leadership team with decades of experience in financial institutions, and channels to communicate with the SEC, Treasury, and Congress to help set rules. Western investment institutions have always been willing to bet on large B2B businesses, but such a substantial investment in a startup is clearly a bet on the people. I also found some clues in the team composition.

The most prominent member of the Etherealize team is undoubtedly Danny Ryan, a co-founder who made significant contributions to The Merge and the launch of the Ethereum Beacon Chain, but left the Ethereum Foundation team in September last year. In his farewell letter on Github, Danny Ryan stated that he left for personal reasons. Perhaps at that moment, he realized that merely nitpicking on technical aspects would not push Ethereum further; instead, using his technical abilities to assist a team that could bring Ethereum to the world was the right path.

On the technical side, Etherealize's co-founder and CTO Zash Obront was previously a co-founder of Scribe Media, which provided book publishing services. In August 2021, he joined Snowcap Technology as a security researcher. The company focuses on security, offering services in AI, VPN, WIFI, and enterprise systems.

The other two founding engineers responsible for technology also have impressive backgrounds. Alec Charbonneau was previously a product manager at Circle, the first publicly listed stablecoin company, and later a software engineer at Stellar, which, like Ripple, focuses on settlements. Another engineer, Alex Wilton, worked at Tesla and at Rivian, another electric vehicle company that raised over $10 billion in 2021, as a product manager.

Product CEO Jay Katz has a background closely related to strategy, having worked in finance, software, smart hardware, law firms, and consulting companies. According to LinkedIn, his actual position is CEO of Lending Market Solutions. Working alongside him is Jennifer Laino, head of credit operations, who has extensive experience in the financial industry, having served as Assistant Vice President at Lehman Brothers, Vice President at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and advisor at Blackstone Group.

Co-founder and CEO Vivek Raman, who also has many years of experience in financial lending, previously held senior credit business roles at Morgan Stanley, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura. In September 2021, he joined Celsius as a Senior DeFi Researcher, but the company collapsed during the 2022 bear market. Afterwards, Vivek Raman joined BitOoda, a digital asset investment bank that completed its Series A financing in early 2023, as general manager. At BitOoda, he focused on bringing institutions into the Ethereum and L2 ecosystems.

Clearly, Etherealize's plan to "bring Wall Street into Ethereum" is initially targeting the credit sector. I speculate that their implementation path may involve launching on-chain settlement lending systems combined with stablecoins and other products. Of course, such products differ from DeFi and may only provide solutions for financial institutions.

In terms of marketing and operations, Etherealize has chosen people with more experience in the Web3 field. Marketing director Valeria Salazar was previously head of marketing strategy and developer and ecosystem relations at Phi Labs, while business operations manager Morgan Takach was formerly head of strategy and operations at Polyhedra.

Etherealize's claim that its team has extensive experience in both Web3 and finance is not unfounded, and it has also seized the opportunity as institutions are trying asset tokenization. Using Ethereum to reshape finance is a story that has been told since the beginning of DeFi Summer. Even as traditional institutions are experimenting with asset on-chaining, we still cannot determine the true market size of this business. However, building a bridge between Ethereum and Wall Street is itself a direction worth exploring for Ethereum.

In addition to specific business, Etherealize has also clearly expressed on its official website its intention to promote global adoption of Ethereum and the L2 ecosystem as a "spokesperson" for Ethereum. Overall, Etherealize is taking over the "go to market" part that the Ethereum Foundation has not done well, through a commercial company. The specific results are worth looking forward to.