Assembly announces $100M capital raise, receives praise from IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener

On Friday, Assembly, a decentralized layer one smart contract network built within the IOTA ecosystem, announced it had raised $100 million from private investors, including LD Capital, HyperChain Capital assembly, and Huobi Ventures.

The project stated that the funds will be used to accelerate the development of decentralized finance protocols, nonfungible tokens, and play-to-earn crypto games.

IOTA is a blockchain designed for facilitating internet-of-things transactions. Its proprietary technology consists of a system of decentralized acyclic graphs that can connect to one another in multiple vectors as opposed to in-series as with a regular blockchain. As a result, one new block can validate two other blocks, leading to self-sustainable transaction verification. This allegedly leads to the complete elimination of transaction fees and minimal energy cost.

The Assembly mainnet is currently scheduled to launch in early 2022 with a large community focus. 70% of its native ASMB tokens are reserved for developer incentives, community-governed decentralized autonomous organizations, and grant programs.

Meet $ASMB, a token to fuel innovation and growth. The vast majority of tokens are designated to ignite #Assembly's ecosystem growth and to reward the @iota community. Visit: https://t.co/ULLTR84ZKN pic.twitter.com/fycCeywW94

— Assembly (@assembly_net) December 9, 2021

In a statement to Cointelegraph, Dominik Schiener, co-founder and chairman of the IOTA Foundation, claimed that there are too many Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM, blockchains stating:

“Ultimately, all of them will face the same problems with fees, scalability, and interoperability. Most of them will fail in the long term as they offer nothing unique.”

When asked about the uniqueness of the Assembly blockchain, Scheiner feels that it all comes down to flexibility:

“Each smart contract chain can be fully customized to the project's needs. In addition, Assembly is already fully EVM-compatible, and has support for WASM [WebAssembly], plus Go, Rust and TypeScript as optional smart contract languages.”

Billionaire investor Stelian Balta, founder of HyperChain Capital, said:

We always needed a feeless, highly scalable network for developers to build highly scalable apps in the crypto ecosystem. Assembly does that. They have been pioneers in the crypto ecosystem since 2015, and we are confident in their experience and their vision for the next decade.