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Cosmos smart contract blockchain Neutron is receiving a boost with a $10 million funding round—a sizeable haul in the tight crypto fundraising environment.
The fundraising haul was led by Binance Labs together with a group of other funders that include CoinFund, Delphi Ventures, LongHash and Nomad. It will support a "major technological and narrative shift" in the expansion of the Neutron smart contract platform, said Neutron core contributor Avril Dutheil in a statement.
In an interview with Decrypt, Dutheil said that the new funding will help gin up interest in the Cosmos ecosystem as "pioneers" in developing smart contract technology. It will also serve as a next step in developing the Atom Economic Zone, an ecosystem on the Cosmos platform that will allow users to transact and collaborate securely across different blockchains.
"We've certainly put a lot of effort into spearheading these initiatives to form a sort of privileged trade zone for DeFi, and for communities to come together and build interesting products together," Dutheil told Decrypt.
Billed as an "internet of blockchains," Cosmos is designed to enable any blockchain within its network to communicate, share data, and transact with any other. Neutron is a platform designed to bring smart contracts, self-executing pieces of code designed to carry out a set of instructions, onto the Cosmos network of interconnected blockchains.
The expansion will integrate a new feature that Cosmos dubs “Replicated Security,” a "shared security model" that protects new developer projects launched on the Cosmos Hub. With this update, the entire validator set on a Cosmos Hub will be needed to certify a consumer chain before it is replicated.
A "tricky" regulatory environment
The raise comes at a time of uncertainty for the crypto industry, after U.S. federal regulators launched lawsuits against the two largest exchanges, Binance and Coinbase. The Securities and Exchange Commission labeled multiple tokens as financial securities through lawsuits rather than through its rule-making process.
Dutheil described the current regulatory environment as “tricky”, but said Cosmos took measures to ensure the Neutron tokens it was issuing were not available to U.S. investors on exchanges. Instead, they would operate within designated “safe harbors” to avoid running afoul of regulators.
“I think at the end of the day, our goal is to build interoperability technologies and distributed decentralized technologies that allow us to reduce the need for trust within financial systems,” Dutheil told Decrypt. “And I think we're going to continue working on this.”