W3 Storage Lab Raises $3 Million in Pre-Seed Round

Based in Cupertino, CA, W3 Storage Lab, a Web3 decentralized application company, closed a pre-seed financing round of $3 million.

The round was co-led by Draper Dragon and OKX Blockdream Ventures with major participation from Lingfeng Capital and participation from other investors.

Proceeds from the round will be used to grow its global team and fund operations.

The start-up has co-developed a next gen distributed storage ecosystem that is based on the public blockchain and cyfs://. This latter is a next-gen protocol that re-invents basic Web protocols – TCP/IP, DNS, and HTTP – to create the infrastructure necessary for the complete decentralization of Web3. It has been in development for over 7 years, practically eliminates latency in file retrieval – a huge problem with current decentralized storage solutions – and has infinite scalability. cyfs:// has recently been open sourced and is now available to the public.

To facilitate a more efficient market for decentralized storage, the company has also worked closely with the DMC Foundation as a major developer of the Datamall Coin ecology. It is a cryptocurrency which has been designed to accurately reflect the true value of decentralized storage, properly incentivize suppliers of decentralized data, stimulate demand for storing real data in a decentralized manner, and create an efficient market for buyers and sellers of decentralized storage. The DMC token is already on Testnet and will be released to Mainnet in the near future.

W3 Storage Lab is developing a series of applications for both consumers and enterprises that will make heavy use of decentralized storage. These applications will leverage the unique capabilities of cyfs://, and will be announced in the coming weeks.

“Web3 has a ton of promise. But other than speculative trading – of both coins and NFTs – very few Web3 applications have delivered meaningful value to everyday consumers,” said Xinglu Lin, CEO and co-founder. “We’re going to change that. The cyfs:// protocol gives us a ton of power to design a series of applications that will deliver compelling and lasting value to online consumers around the world.“

“We”re excited to partner with W3 Storage Lab,” said Richard Wang, MD, Draper Dragon. “They’ve assembled a top notch team with a clear vision on how they want to positively impact the Internet and the world. They’re developing some real break-through technology, and the market desperately needs their solutions. Look for some more ground-breaking announcements from W3 Storage Lab soon.”

“An effective and efficient decentralized storage system is a core infrastructure to sustain
the next stage of growth and user adoption for the Web3,” says Dr. Ming Shu, partner,
Lingfeng Capital. “We are thrilled by the prospect that W3 Storage Lab will be the player
to deliver a series of products that take the user experiences to a new level.”

The W3 Storage Lab team has developed technology that accounted for more than 50% of all global P2P traffic and has issued a combined total of over 15 blockchain tokens.

Lin was the co-founder of 2 successful start-ups in China and is a prominent name in the Chinese Internet sector. Zhicong Liu, founding engineer, architected cyfs://.

Victor Chen, COO and DMC Foundation chair, was CTO of Unisplendour, an Internet infrastructure provider and previously worked in IBM Networking.

Thi Thumasathit, VP marketing, is an experienced builder of early-stage Silicon Valley start-ups with experience in B2C, enterprise SaaS, cybersecurity, and ad:tech, as well as consulting experience at McKinsey & Company.