Staking Tech Company Kiln Closes $17.8M, Eyes Future ETH Staking Demand

Staking infrastructure firm Kiln closes $17.8 million fundraising led by Consensys, GSR and Kraken Ventures .

Staking technology provider Kiln has closed a $17.8 million fundraising round with companies like Consensys and Kraken Ventures. The company sees "exponential" growth in demand for ETH staking services from institutional clients in the future.

Kiln is a software-as-a-service provider focused on enterprise-grade staking solutions on 16 different proof-of-stake blockchain protocols. Its infrastructure allows users to bet on-chain while maintaining custody of assets across separate solutions as well as cloud platforms and validator clients.

An announcement shared with Cointelegraph described the growing institutionalization of cryptocurrency staking as a trend in the market. According to Kiln, this drives the need for "validator-agnostic APIs and services" to enable multi-vendor staking.

Cointelegraph sat down with Kiln Co-Founder and CEO Laszlo Szabo to unpack the need for multi-faceted staking services. According to Szabo, major exchanges and service providers like Coinbase, Ledger, and Binance serve an increasingly institutionalized staking market and need to interact with multiple staking providers to spread operational risk:

"The legacy solution is to manage relationships with staking providers independently, leaving the product and engineering teams of major companies to integrate different staking providers into their workflows."< /p>

Integrating new protocols for staking now requires custom staking and undo transactions for each individual protocol format, as well as running a data reward collection infrastructure and integrating 'custom custodian APIs.

This is one of the main reasons why Kiln has created a suite of products to enable wallets, custodians and exchanges to manage multi-vendor staking.

Ethereum's recent transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus also leads Sazbo to believe that ETH staking demand will "exponentially increase". His firm cited data from other PoS protocols that see between 50-80% of assets staked, compared to the 12.5% ​​of total ETH supply currently staked in the Beacon Chain contract.

Kiln already serves institutional clients such as Ledger, Binance...