Morph, a blockchain company making a layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution aimed at assisting developers building consumer-focused decentralized apps, today announced it has raised $20 million in a seed funding round led by Dragonfly Capital.

The funding round attracted participation from Panthera Capital, Foresight Ventures, The Spartan Group, MEXC Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Public Works, MH Ventures and Everyrealm.

Morph is building what is known as a Layer 2 network for Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain after Bitcoin. A Layer 2 blockchain is a separate chain that operates alongside another, in the case of Morph, it processes transactions more quickly using optimizing rollup technology says it’s the first to build with a “digitized sequencer” that will organize and batch off-chain transactions efficiently before submitting them to the Ethereum blockchain.

Larger blockchains suffer from congestion and slowed transaction times. That opens up the opportunity for Layer 2 blockchains to offload transactions and prepare them for batch processing before submitting them. In turn, that allows applications to have them optimized, which can greatly reduce transaction latency and costs.

Blockchain technology allows decentralized applications, or dapps, to execute peer-to-peer on their networks without the need for centralized authority. That has given rise to numerous different types of applications including finance apps that don’t require banks, decentralized exchanges and decentralized games that allow the ownership of in game items.

The company said most Layer 2 networks are focused on decentralized finance, which aims to provide investors and token economies transaction speed and cost savings. However, Morph wants to deliver a developer-friendly pipeline for consumer apps to build entertainment, gaming and social apps on its platform as well.

“The existing L2 market is focused solely on short-term gains to be able to win the next casino round, rather than building for sustainable success,” said co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Azeem Khan. “At Morph, we proudly help developers to create decentralized apps that can truly make a long-term difference and win over a mainstream user base,” he said.

The company released a roadmap featuring how it would empower builders and support projects going forward in its ecosystem, including incentives for building on its testnet and mainnet. The company said that it would be running hackathons and forming an incubator program that would include grants of up to 100,000 USDT tokens to select projects. The company also collaborated with the Bitget Wallet, a crypto wallet with 19 million active users, to use the Morph solution and help drive adoption for project developers.

Morph is launching its solution into a crowded market of Ethereum Layer 2 solutions including some that tout themselves as “developer-friendly.” They include platforms such as Arbitrium One from Offchain Labs Inc., Polygon and Coinbase Global Inc.’s developer-friendly Layer 2 solution Base.

Image: Nepool