Crypto Firm Llama Closes $6M Funding Round Led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund

Electric Capital also led the seed round for the startup, which provides a protocol-focused access control and governance platform for smart contracts.

Llama, an access control and governance platform for smart contracts, announced on Monday a $6 million seed funding round led by Founders Fund and Electric Capital.

The platform is now live on all Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)- compatible blockchains, according to the announcement post.

San Francisco-based venture capital firm Founders Fund was co-founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who also co-founded PayPal. The firm, which was founded in 2005, invests across all stages and sectors and its portfolio companies include Lyft, Facebook, SpaceX and Stripe.

Founders Fund gained some crypto expertise earlier this year when Joey Krug left his role as co-chief investment officer at crypto investing giant Pantera and joined the firm.

Llama aims to make it easier and more secure for teams to establish governance for its protocols. The platform allows protocols to define granular roles and permissions for executing transactions, such as protocol upgrades, fund transfers, parameter changes, security updates or emergency pauses in the event of a liquidity crisis. The team can grant participants the level of permission power needed for their respective role. Llama users can also set specific rules for token approvals and transfers.An on-chain policy engine makes the setting of permissions and roles a transparent process.

“Today, protocols are spending precious engineering resources forking open-source frameworks, integrating complex access control modules, and hacking together custom frontends. Llama provides a fullstack solution for access control and governance that lets teams focus on what they do best: building their core product,” wrote the Llama team in the announcement post.

Other investors in the round included Elad Gil, Sandeep Nailwal (co-founder of the Polygon blockchain), Stani Kulechov (founder of lending protocol Aave), Will Gaybrick, Amplify Partners and FJ Labs.