The Block: Tinder co-founder's Jam Fund backs Fun’s $3.9 million raise

Fun, a blockchain software development company, raised $3.9 million in a pre-seed round led by Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen’s Jam Fund.

Other investors include Soma Ventures, Nomo Ventures and Great Oaks Venture Capital, according to a company release.

Fun is founded by 23-year-old Alex Fine and Mario Baxter, a former machine learning engineer at Meta. It will build applications and tools on top of the Odsy network.

“We want to build wallet infrastructure, we want to enable users to have more seamless access to multi-chain wallets to multi-chain accounts and those accounts should not behave in the primitive way that multi-sigs behave where every transaction is subject to the same signing rules,” said Fine in an interview with The Block.

What is the Odsy network? The Odsy network is a decentralized access control layer that emerged from stealth in August. It features a primitive, which is a segment of code on the blockchain, known as dynamic decentralized wallets (DWallets).

DWallets are blockchain agnostic and can sign certain transactions using universally accepted algorithms. The primitive aims to help move away from the more centralized process of holding a private key directly.

“We're focusing on a few different ideas,” Fine said. “A lot of them are around multi-chain interoperability and how wallets interact with that. We can’t really release our products on Odsy until Odsy is released. So, our plan is to work closely with them, such that at mainnet launch, once the validators are up and running, we’re very well positioned to take our products to market.”

The Odsy network is still being developed. Omer Sadika, co-founder of the network, said in an interview that a testnet could go live in the next four to six months.

Becoming the ConsenSys of the Odsy network Fun aims to become the ConsenSys of the Odsy network, helping to build out applications that leverage the DWallet primitive.

It’s the second company to receive backing on the network. The first is DWallet Labs, which raised $5 million in August to support organizations building on Odsy and provide professional services to the Odsy Foundation.

"We're trying to build protocols and solutions are that are more generic," Sadika said. "Unlike Fun that are trying to build solutions that are specific and for a specific user. Our goal at DWallet Labs is to focus more on the infrastructure."

Despite only announcing the round today, Fun closed the $3.9 million round in March, just before the bear market, Fine said. The proceeds are being used to hire development talent.

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