Quick take:
- The fundraising values the crypto messaging startup at $300 million, according to the announcement on Thursday.
- As part of Union Square Ventures’ co-leading role in the funding, its CEO, Fred Wilson, joined Ephemera’s board.
- The fundraising was structured as equity with token warrants, Ephemera cofounder and CEO Shane Mac told Fortune.
Ephemera, a blockchain-based messaging platform, has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round co-led by Union Square Ventures, A16z Crypto and Lightspeed Faction. The fundraising also attracted participation from Coinbase, Sound Ventures, and the actor Ashton Kutcher.
The fundraising was structured as equity with token warrants, and values the SocialFi platform at $300 million, according to the report by Fortune. As a part of Union Square Ventures’ co-leading role in the funding, its CEO, Fred Wilson, joined Ephemera’s board.
Ephemera is built by the developers behind the protocol XMTP, a decentralised messaging network that leverages IETF-standard Messaging Layer Security, the open-source security foundation that is reportedly also used by the likes of Mozilla, Google, Wire, and Cisco.
“At the core,” Wilson said of XMTP, “it’s just a more open protocol that allows you to prove it’s private and secure, not trust Facebook and Signal to tell you their server is secure.”
According to Wilson, popular messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp are too centralised, adding that Signal, which offers end-to-end encryption, or cryptography that permits only the sender and receiver to read a message, may be the most secure of all popular centralised messaging platforms.
This type of end-to-end encryption ensures big techs like Meta do not snoop on their users, he added. However, Wilson also argues that despite the end-to-end encryption, users do not own those messages, and cannot port their conversations off the platform.
This is where XMTP comes in, according to Wilson, adding that the protocol allows any messaging app built on top of it to port prior conversations from another messaging app to a new one. Like transferring your chat from Signal to WhatsApp.
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