Gear Technologies raised $12M to benefit the DOT ecosystem

Gear Technologies, a smart-contract layer supporting the Polkadot blockchain framework, has raised $12 million in a Blockchange-led funding round.  Lemniscap, an investment firm specializing in investments in emerging crypto assets, the hedge fund management firm - Three Arrows Capital,  and the asset management company - Distributed Global are among the other companies that took part in the funding round.

Gear's infrastructure efforts will benefit our entire ecosystem," according to Polkadot CEO Gavin Wood, who was there among the top executives of Parity Technologies and Web3 Foundation took part in the round.

The announcement is considered to be a major milestone for Polkadot. The network’s first parachains – basically, layer 1 blockchains running atop the layer 0 that is Polkadot – went live on Saturday.
Polkadot does not support contract development on its own because it is more of a meta-protocol than an application platform, according to Gear Technologies founder Nikolay Volf, who was previously a core developer at Parity and worked closely with Wood for six years.

In an interview, Volf stated, "The overarching goal is to provide a fast track for smart-contract development in the Polkadot ecosystem. Our approach to how multiple contracts interact with one other is a very parallelizable design in terms of technology." As indicated by Volf, Gear's next move is to launch a testnet in early 2020 and pass third-party security and financial audits.

We would like to say a big thank you to Blockchange @BlockchangeVC, Gavin Wood @gavofyork and everyone else who took part in our private investment round. This is just the beginning. More is yet to come! https://t.co/1QrrLWxL6V

— Gear Technologies (@gear_techs) December 20, 2021

"No single blockchain design works optimally for every use case. Each chain comes with trade-offs making it good for some applications and not others. The parachain model was created with the belief that the future of Web 3 will involve many different types of blockchains working together."

-  Gavin Wood