What is Bastion, the encryption product that received a $25 million seed round lead by a16z?

Bastion, the encryption product, recently secured a $25 million seed round led by a16z.

Author: Bastion Team; Translator: LianGuaixiaozou

Bastion is a web3 orchestrator that helps enterprises and projects easily create next-generation on-chain and off-chain products. We believe that enterprises have great interest and opportunities to leverage digital assets to create amazing user experiences, strengthen loyalty, and optimize business outcomes.

So far, enterprises have faced incredible difficulties in building web3 products with outstanding user experiences: users find it difficult to operate and protect their wallets, the final confirmation time of blockchain can be slow, network gas fees fluctuate dramatically, and a single product often requires multiple transactions on the chain.

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We developed Bastion to make web3 accessible, robust, secure, and interoperable—so that enterprises using Bastion can focus on developing seamless, fast, and more engaging products and experiences.

At Bastion, we do not believe that the future of web3 means all interactions have to be on-chain. We are building a system that can intelligently choose the best route and seamlessly empower the most innovative web3 products and projects, whether on-chain or off-chain.

1. Bastion Platform: Our Comprehensive Toolset

The core mission of Bastion is to eliminate barriers in building products in the current web3 space—we are tired of complex crypto wallets, isolated payment platforms, and limited interaction between brands and customers.

So we created our own platform:

• Hosted Wallet API: Key storage supported by secure hardware, accessed through a powerful and easy-to-use API that abstracts the complex interactions that may involve multiple transactions on the chain.

• Intelligent Transaction Routing: Intelligent routing ensures that transactions are efficiently processed between users: if a transaction does not need to be on-chain, Bastion will handle it off-chain, enabling instant and truly gas-free interactions.

• User Analytics and Insights: Data collection and analysis provide key metrics for all on-chain (all wallets and chains) and off-chain (e.g., identity verification for token-gated events) user behaviors.

In summary, Bastion is a new attempt at the interactive future driven by web3 infrastructure, with a seamless user experience of web2. Bastion reduces the burden of on-chain complexity for users and provides off-chain value for enterprises. Our goal is to become the ultimate coordination layer for traditional enterprises to build web3. By easily coordinating multiple components to achieve results greater than the sum of their parts, enterprises using Bastion for development will no longer need to create or build multiple solutions from scratch.

Our platform is now live and we would be delighted to show you how Bastion can help unlock new experiences for your customers.

2. How Bastion was Formed: Our Founders and Team

The inspiration and foundation for Bastion came from the seven-year collaboration of our founding team in the field of digital assets and security.

Our initial collaboration was to secure Docker, an infrastructure platform designed to simplify application running. Today, Docker has become an ubiquitous technology, mainly used in development and cloud tasks, providing a seamless default secure user experience.

Our first foray into the digital asset field was with Anchorage Digital, where we joined as founding engineers and early engineers with the goal of securing billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies for various institutions. Together, we worked to build a hardware-backed private key storage platform, which ultimately became the security technology support for the first federally chartered crypto bank. Then, we shifted our focus to a large user base, where we built and led the wallet infrastructure and custody program on Meta’s cryptocurrency wallet Novi.

Before founding Bastion, we also joined Andreessen Horowitz Crypto as the Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Technology Officer, where we collaborated closely with many outstanding founders and teams who were eager to have solutions like Bastion to help build their products.

Our founding team is a key differentiating factor for our product, and as we continue to expand Bastion, instilling a commitment to our vision will be crucial. Our team has extensive expertise, including experience leading engineering programs at top tech companies, as well as supervising successful compliance and regulatory programs in the web2 and web3 domains.

We are building on this solid foundation and welcome talented partners to join us.

3. Industry leader support: Our funding situation

Bastion has raised $25 million in seed funding, led by a16z crypto, with participation from Laser Digital Ventures, LianGuaicky McCormick’s Not Boring Capital, Tarun Chitra’s Robot Ventures, Sancus Ventures, Alchemy Ventures, Isos7 Venture Fund, Tom Brady’s NFT platform Autograph, Aptos Foundation, as well as individual investors Ryan Wyatt, Roham Gharegozlou, Dan Guido, and several other leaders in the web3 and web2 domains. We appreciate the advice provided by David Marcus and Dan Boneh.

4. Bastion’s future

At Bastion, we are excited to support companies in creating their next generation products, connecting the best web2 and web3 resources. As more and more businesses join web3, we believe Bastion is the key platform they need for development.

We will continue to update Blocking; if you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us!