Blockchain infrastructure provider Figment today announced a $110 million funding round to expand its services for the application layer of Web 3.0 decentralized networks at a $1.4 billion valuation.

The Series C round, which follows a $50 million Series B round in August, was led by software investment firm Thoma Brovo. Counterpoint Global, Binance Labs, Mirae Asset, ParaFi Capital, Avon Ventures, Bitstamp, CMS Holdings, Two Sigma, B Capital Group and StarkWare, among others, also participated in the round.

Figment’s mission is to provide infrastructure access to “proof-of-stake” or PoS blockchains, which operate by a type of transaction validation known as “staking.” Users on these blockchains must lock up cryptocurrency tokens by staking them to prove that they have a stake in the security of the blockchain. This earns users token rewards each time a new block is added to the chain.

“Figment has had an exceptional year marked by the continued success and explosive growth as PoS has become mainstream amid the growing movement to make finance more accessible and inclusive,” said Lorien Gabel, co-founder and chief executive of Figment.

A report from crypto analysis firm Staked in October projected that staking rewards from PoS blockchains would hit $18 billion this quarter. The same report cited the market cap of the top 30 PoS blockchain digital assets hit an all-time high of $594 billion, which is just over half of the total crypto market cap including bitcoin.

Figment said it had a banner year that included reaching more than $7.5 billion in digital assets staked with its infrastructure across 50 supported networks. The blockchain networks that the company supports include Ethereum — which is going fully PoS soon — Cardano, Celo, Polkadot, Solana and many more.

With the additional funding, Figment also intends to add even more PoS blockchains to its roster. The company also said that it now supports more than 130 institutional clients, up from 31 since the previous year.

As Figment expands its support for PoS blockchains and increases participation in staking, it’s also seeking to enable greater development of middleware and decentralized applications built on blockchain infrastructure. To do that, the company has increased the node capacity of its developer platform DataHub and provided core development expertise for indexing protocol The Graph and the oracle protocol Pyth network.

DataHub is a platform provided by Figment that allows developers an easy way to launch their own dapps, or distributed apps, for PoS blockchains using enterprise-grade infrastructure with maximum reliability. It delivers an application programming interface for developers to build for dapps, analytics, crypto wallets, exchanges and custody needs and design block explorers.

With this new funding, the company also intends to expand its engineering team. Figment invested in recruiting talent over the past year and significantly grew its global headcount over the past year to more than 119.

“We’re seeing tons of experienced engineers jump from traditional software into this space,” said Gabel. “Many of these people have joined our team and we have created an amazing Web 3 native organizational culture around them.”

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