Shiba Inu, the popular cryptocurrency project, has achieved a significant milestone by raising an impressive $12 million through the sale of its unreleased token, TREAT, to venture capital investors. This funding round saw the participation of prominent investors such as Mechanism Capital, Animoca Brands, Polygon Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Shima Capital, Morningstar Ventures, DWF Ventures, Woodstock Fund, Comma 3 Ventures, and Stake Capital.
It is worth noting that although some of these investors, including Mechanism Capital and Shima Capital, are seemingly based in the United States, Shytoshi Kusama, the lead developer of Shiba Inu, clarified that none of the investors are actually U.S.-based, although their full entity names cannot be disclosed at this time.
The fundraising process for this round began several months ago and was recently concluded. While the exact valuation of Shiba Inu was not disclosed, insiders familiar with the situation revealed that it was a staged round with valuations of $75 million, $100 million, and $200 million for each stage, respectively. Kusama mentioned that this token round encompassed both pre-seed and seed rounds.
The TREAT token, which Shiba Inu offered to investors, serves as a utility and governance token for its privacy-focused Layer 3 blockchain. This blockchain is built on top of the Shibarium Layer 2 platform. Kusama stated that TREAT will be the last non-stable token released by Shiba Inu and revealed plans to introduce a new token called Shi by the end of this year.
Shiba Inu’s ecosystem consists of several existing tokens, including the popular SHIB memecoin, BONE (which acts as the governance token for Shibarium), and LEASH (a fixed-supply token exclusively held by dedicated Shiba Inu users). LEASH provides various benefits and rewards to its holders, including rewards in BONE.
Although the official release of the TREAT token is still pending, certain TREAT tokens are already being traded on platforms such as CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap. However, Kusama has labeled these tokens as “scams.” The genuine TREAT token will be minted by The Shiba Inu Mint S.A., a corporation based in Panama.
Shiba Inu’s Layer 3 blockchain will leverage fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) technology provided by cryptography firm Zama. FHE is renowned for its strong data encryption capabilities, ensuring end-to-end security even during data processing. Shiba Inu’s innovative encryption chain aims to address various challenges in the cryptocurrency space, particularly privacy and trust concerns, benefiting their large community and the increasing number of individuals entering the cryptocurrency world. Furthermore, the new blockchain is designed to comply with regulatory standards, ensuring international legal conformity while safeguarding data privacy and individual security.
In order to prevent scammers from taking advantage, Kusama has chosen not to disclose the name of the Layer 3 blockchain, similar to the approach taken with the TREAT tokens. Additionally, Shiba Inu is actively working on enhancing the Shibarium user interface by adding support for MetaMask and Coinbase wallets, as reported by Crypto News Flash.