Llama Raises $6 Mln To Enhance Governance of Blockchain Protocols

Llama, a smart contract platform, has successfully raised $6 million in seed funding from Founders Fund and Electric Capital, along with other prominent investors such as Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder of Polygon blockchain, and Stani Kulechov, the founder of lending protocol Aave.

Llama aims to enhance the governance of blockchain protocols by allowing them to encode roles and permissions for on-chain actions such as fund transfers or modification of protocol parameters.

The platform intends to mitigate the inefficiencies and security vulnerabilities that may cause poor performance or, worse, hacking and exploitation.

Llama has announced a capital raise that will be used to develop its platform further. Co-founders Shreyas Hariharan and Austin Greene believe Llama’s platform will help developers focus on their core products.

According to Hariharan, builders can use Llama to scale their on-chain entities by defining roles and permissions for critical actions. These could include protocol upgrades, moving treasury funds, editing smart contract parameters, and initiating emergency halts.

Greene explained that Llama’s platform can potentially reduce development costs, leading to more secure and trustworthy decentralized protocols that are more resistant to exploits.

“Building and maintaining privileged access systems requires precious engineering resources and a large security budget. Teams just want a secure way to set and iterate on granular roles and permissions for all their decision-makers without writing custom modules,” Greene added.

The Llama co-founders created their full-stack solution after working extensively with blockchain builders and understanding the challenges of running smart contracts.

“We’ve contributed to leading protocols and used our learnings to build the product we wish we had,” said Hariharan.

Other Llama seed investors include Stripe’s president of product and business, Willy Gaybrick, Anchorage CEO Nathan McCauley, Coinbase protocol specialist Viktor Bunin, Zeitgeist founder Sina Habinian, and entities such as Elad Gil, Amplify Partners, Reverie, and FJ Labs.