Paradigm leads crypto firewall provider Blowfish’s $11.8 million raise

Web3 firewall provider Blowfish emerged from stealth having announced the closure of an $11.8 million funding round led by Paradigm. 

Other investors included Dragonfly Capital, Uniswap Lab Ventures, Hypersphere and 0xLabs, according to a company blog post. 

Founded by a team of engineers from companies such as Meta, 0xLabs and MakerDAO, Blowfish provides firewall technology to protect web3 users from malicious transactions. 

Blowfish’s API helps wallets and custodians protect users from attacks such as phishing and decentralized application DNS hijacking, the company said. The API will return real-time warnings and easy to understand transaction context. 

Phantom, a wallet provider on Solana, has already teamed up with Blowfish. 

“Blowfish has helped us protect thousands of our users from malicious scams & fraud,” said Francesco Agosti, chief technology officer and co-founder of Phantom. “We’ve partnered with them because we trust their ability to continue building a great product that stays one step ahead of scammers.”

The new funds raised by Blowfish will be used to expand the team, upgrade the API’s fraud detection engine and expand to new blockchains. Blowfish is already available on  Solana, Ethereum and Polygon.

Blowfish isn’t the only crypto firewall provider to raise money this week. Harpie, an on-chain firewall provider, raised $4.5 million in a seed round to prevent theft on Ethereum wallets. Dragonfly Capital also participated in Harpie’s round.

Through July 2022, $1.9 billion worth of crypto had been stolen in hacks of services, compared to just under $1.2 billion at the same point in 2021, according to an August report from Chainalysis.