[PRESS RELEASE – San Francisco, CA, November 20th, 2023]

Latest Round Led by Placeholder to Fuel Layer-1 Protocol with Fastest Developer Growth this Cycle

Saga, a top Layer-1 protocol and developer ecosystem in web3, today announced the raise of its $5 million seed extension round led by Placeholder, a premier venture capital firm that invests in decentralized protocols and web3 services. This investment marks the largest percentage stake in a pre-Layer-1 launch in Placeholder’s history. Additional investors in this latest round include Longhash Ventures, Com2uS, Dispersion Capital, Red Beard Ventures, Tykhe Ventures and AVID3, among others. To date, Saga has raised a total of $13.5 million.

Saga will continue its projected growth by expanding its team of cutting-edge technologists, ambitiously building its community and ecosystem activation via strategic partnerships, and growing its Saga Innovator Program. In less than two years, Saga has 295 Innovator projects building on its protocol, and anticipates over 300 when the Saga Mainnet launches in early 2024. Additionally, Saga has cemented partnerships with flagship web3 projects including Polygon, Avalanche, and Celestia, positioning itself as a leader in web3 development.

“Saga’s vision is to unblock developers from the high barriers to successfully building in web3,” said Rebecca Liao, Co-founder and CEO of Saga. “We’re thrilled to have Placeholder lead this round, as they, along with our other amazing investors, are helping to empower and accelerate our support of projects with the Integrated Stack – what developers have been waiting for to easily create consumer apps for broad adoption.”

Saga is the next iteration of a base protocol in web3 – hyper-focused on developer needs, and dedicated to ensuring blockspace is abundant and can be simply accessed. For every monolithic L1, blockspace has come to mean scarcity, creating high and variable gas fees, congestion, and throughput limitations. The modular stack attempts to solve these problems with paralyzing complexity: rollups, data availability, fraud proofs and shared sequencers are all separate components that have their own cost and performance challenges. Saga’s Integrated Stack is the next disruption in web3.

Saga is hot off the heels of launching its Incentivized Testnet (ITN), named Pegasus. After only two weeks, Pegasus logged over 150,000 transactions and opened 30,000 wallets, with one of the highest numbers of participants and transactions for an ITN. Saga will be airdropping tokens to Pegasus participants – and other community members outside the ITN – on performance in predetermined quests. Additional details can be found here.

“We expect blockchain architectures in the coming years to be much more reminiscent of cloud architectures, with Saga purpose-built to help usher in that future,” said Chris Burniske, Partner at Placeholder. “On-demand blockspace provisioning, paired with cutting-edge validator orchestration, sets Saga up to provide blockspace as it’s needed in a horizontal, scale-out fashion akin to the cloud environments of today. The Saga team has roots going back to the earliest days of Cosmos, alongside power players in research, engineering, and politics, setting Saga up to lead a major movement within web3.”

Saga continues to bring leading web3 projects, developers and creators together in the Saga Multiverse through its strategic partnerships and encouraging collaboration among its ecosystem and community. The Saga protocol offers an integrated stack of automated, high-performance, gasless, interoperable, and customizable chains, called Chainlets. Saga developers can interoperate freely among Chainlets and take advantage of fast bridging to other ecosystems via fast transaction finality on Chainlets. This allows developers to not only move assets, communications and creations cross-chain, but also to elastically scale their applications across multiple Chainlets. Developers can therefore experience limitless performance and scalability that is only possible with Saga.

Note: The airdrop is not and will not be available to U.S. persons (or persons acting on behalf of U.S. persons). In order to participate in the airdrop, a person or entity must not be a U.S. Person as defined in Rule 902 under the United States Securities Act of 1933 or a U.S. person within the meaning Section 7701(a)(30) of the United States Internal Revenue Code. A full terms and conditions for participation in the airdrop will be made available as part of the claims process.

About Saga

Recognized as a leading developer ecosystem in crypto and web3 gaming, Saga is creating the developer environment of the future. Its mission is to help creators unblock themselves and build where blockspace is at its most plentiful and simple. Saga was founded in 2022. Early seed investors include Placeholder, Maven11, Longhash, Samsung, Com2uS, and Polygon. Originally built on Cosmos, Saga has furthered its presence by bringing typically disparate but the best ecosystems into its Saga Multiverse through ongoing strategic partnerships.

To learn more about the Saga protocol, check out Saga’s website, litepaper, and developer documentation. Be sure to join Saga’s Discord and Telegram and follow Saga on Twitter for the latest news and updates.