Crypto infrastructure provider Orbs raising $10 million from DWF Labs in token round

Orbs, a developer of crypto infrastructure, is set to raise up to $10 million from DWF Labs.

DWF Labs will purchase Orbs tokens worth up to $10 million, the web3 investment firm said Tuesday. The first tranche of the total investment settled today, Orbs CEO Nadav Shemesh told The Block. He added that the rest of the investment will be "made over time to average price."

Founded in 2017, Israel-based Orbs offers a blockchain network that works as a "separate execution layer between Layer 1/ Layer 2 solutions and the application layer, as part of a tiered blockchain stack, enhancing the capabilities of smart contracts," according to Shemesh.

With DWF's investment, Orbs plans to continue developing its infrastructure to grow adoption, both on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains and on The Open Network (TON), Shemesh said. Orbs recently started building on TON as the first non-EVM Layer 1.

TON was originally introduced by the Telegram team. It has been running as an open-source community project since 2020.

"Orbs is a highly promising project within the TON ecosystem, and we are pleased to invest in their vision for the future of decentralized finance," Andrei Grachev, managing partner at DWF Labs, said.

DWF Labs recently partnered with the TON Foundation and committed $10 million to support the TON ecosystem. DWF also said it would invest in 50 seed-stage startups over the next 12 months to grow the ecosystem.

Orbs previously raised $118 million in 2018. The Orbs token is trading around 10% up at the time of writing at $0.033, according to CoinGecko.

Update: Headline and article updated for clarity.