Jito Secures $50 Million Investment to Facilitate On-Chain Finance

Venture capital fund a16z crypto has invested $50 million in Jito Foundation, which oversees the Jito protocols and the Jito Network technology that provides a liquid staking protocol to the Solana ecosystem.

Jito Foundation said in a Thursday (Oct. 16) press release that it will use the funding to advance Jito Network technology and enhance Solana’s position as “the home of Internet Capital Markets.”

“This investment validates our commitment to building the technology, partnerships and policy foundations that bring on-chain finance into the mainstream,” Jito Foundation President Brian Smith said in the release. “This milestone for Jito reflects our commitment to delivering infrastructure that not only scales with the network but maximizes economic value for all participants.”

Jito Foundation highlighted its September launch of its Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM) on Solana mainnet, saying in the press release that BAM enhances the network’s transparency, privacy and flexibility, and provides validators and builders with new revenue opportunities, app-level customizability and on-chain composability.

In its own announcement of the investment, a16z crypto said Jito’s BAM provides Solana with mechanisms that keep transactions encrypted until the moment they execute and that allow Solana applications to define their own transaction ordering rules.

“Building a blockchain fast enough for the Internet’s Capital Markets was the first challenge Solana had to overcome,” Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Ali Yahya said in the announcement. “Building one where those markets can function fairly is now the second. Jito is at the forefront of that effort.”

In another, separate development in this space, blockchain-based payments firm Fnality International said in September that it raised $135 million in new funding. The company said that since launching the Sterling Fnality Payment System in the United Kingdom in 2023, the company has focused on extending its network’s footprint to other major currencies, along with liquidity management solutions, and providing settlement interoperability for innovations like stablecoins and tokenized deposits.

In August, Mesh secured additional investments to accelerate the growth of its global cryptocurrency payments network, bringing the company’s total capital funding to more than $130 million.

During the same month, Riva raised $3 million in a pre-seed funding round to support the global rollout of its blockchain-powered technology that facilitates global money transfers.