NodeKit, the team developing SEQ, a shared sequencer L1, has raised $1.2M in a pre-seed round. The round was led by Borderless Capital with participation from Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund, Polygon Ventures, Wormhole Cross-Chain Ecosystem Fund, and many angels (including key angel investors such as Avail’s Anurag Arjun and BENQI’s @hn_avax). The team is using the funding to help decentralize the next generation of rollups powered by SEQ.
“Rollups desire a cost-effective, lightning-fast, decentralized sequencer to improve the quality of their users’ experience. NodeKit fulfills this need.” – Noah Pravecek, Co-Founder & CEO
SEQ is designed to help decentralize rollup transaction sequencing, directly addressing the main issue overshadowing rollups: centralization. SEQ aims to help rollups capitalize on their advantages with fewer tradeoffs, bringing them greater robustness, performance, and interoperability.
“NodeKit is addressing some of the deepest challenges across the modular Web3 ecosystem. Alongside the tremendous adoption of L2 solutions (“rollups”), centralization remains prevalent despite the obvious drawbacks it brings, including critical censorship and performance issues. Through SEQ, NodeKit introduces atomic composability and shared sequencing to the leading protocols bringing economic efficiency and true decentralization for cross-chain modularity.” – Alpen Sheth, PhD, Senior Partner, Borderless Capital
Rollups integrating with SEQ will gain new cross-chain interoperability. This interoperability is possible because SEQ orders blocks for multiple rollups, allowing for atomic inclusion using atomic bundles within the same block.
In a time of L2 proliferation, NodeKit’s raise and first product is timely. Most L2s remain highly centralized, with single points of failure endangering whole networks. NodeKit aims to solve the centralization problem by incorporating a decentralized network of validators, making rollups more robust. NodeKit will actively work with each rollup, guiding them on their path toward greater decentralization.
NodeKit’s team consists of three co-founders aged 21, 21, and 20. Pravecek is CEO, Nick Preszler is CTO, and Ricardo Tavarez is the third co-founder and founding software engineer. All three have dropped out of universities in the American Midwest to fully pursue NodeKit and Web3.
