“I’ve been following and studying the crypto and blockchain space since its earliest days, and I’ve been waiting for a company that can build the strength and decentralized aspects of a public chain with the speed, security, and scalability of a next-gen platform,” said Piezer.

According to The Block, other investors in the Series A include Arrington XRP Capital, Consensus Capital, Blockchange Ventures and Axiom Holdings Group, among others.

Casper said it is aiming to solve the Scalability Trilemma, which refers to the tradeoffs that crypto projects must make when deciding how to optimize the underlying architecture of their own blockchain.

CasperLabs was launched in February with Ethereum Foundation researcher Vlad Zamfir serving as lead consensus protocol architect. The project is working to build a new blockchain based on a version of proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus protocol. “Blockchain technology has created an opportunity for protocol to solve problems that previously required more reliance on corporations and more trust in authority,” said Zamfir. “The tech is still nascent, and it’s possible that protocols deployed today will not fulfill the promise of blockchain technology.”