Polygon MEV protocol FastLane gets $2.3 million in raise led by Multicoin Capital

Quick Take

FastLane’s seed round will support its hiring efforts.
The project claims that supporting MEV through its protocol will help to protect against spam and blockchain reorgs.

Polygon MEV protocol FastLane raised $2.3 million in a seed round led by Multicoin Capital.

The funding will be used to hire three senior blockchain engineers and an enterprise account director, according to a press release. Other investors in the raise included Polygon Ventures, Shima Capital, Delphi Ventures, Everstake, Ventures, a41 Ventures and Symbolic Capital.

The protocol is focused on supporting MEV, or maximal extractable value, on the Polygon chain — similar to how Flashbots works on Ethereum. It's supported by 23% of validators on Polygon, and it distributes revenue generated from MEV activities to participating validators.

MEV is generated when the entity producing the block in the chain can order transactions in a certain way for either their own benefit, or that of a third party. Common examples are sandwich attacks where prices of tokens are manipulated before and after trades, causing the trade to be executed at a worse price — for the MEV bot owner's benefit. Typically the owner of the MEV bot will pay a portion of the rewards to a validator through MEV software, such as FastLane, to order the trades to support such a maneuver.

Polygon has long had a problem with high levels of spam transactions, often with the goal of extracting MEV, because of its cheap fees. FastLane CEO Alex Watts said that FastLane helps to counteract this.

"Reducing spam significantly alleviates network stress, and, by proxy, the threat of reorgs and other trading attacks," he said, with reorgs referring to when a number of blocks in the chain is changed for a new set of blocks, causing uncertainty for transaction confirmations.