Hot Cross Closes $5M Ecosystem Growth Round to Expand its Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, and Polygon Suite
Hot Cross is proud to announce that we have closed a $5M Ecosystem Growth Round, led primarily by builder-founders and leaders at Polygon, Coin98, Frontier, Project SEED, Unmarshal, Lancer Capital, Black Mamba Ventures, and TCVN.
Early investors in seed and private rounds from late 2020 to early 2021 were builder-founders, leaders, and exchanges at Frontier, BMV, MEXC Global, OKEx Blockdream Ventures, Coin98, StaFi, Unmarshal, TAG Ventures, and Kyber Network.
With this new round of fundraising, Hot Cross is poised to enter 2022 with a fresh injection of capital to tackle some of the most in-demand needs of the blockchain industry today, including multi-chain and cross-chain web3 applications and infrastructure, as well as explorations into GameFi, SocialFi, and DAO infra/apps. This round also allows us to stay vigilant about security as we continue to build out what has become a full-fledged application playground since we launched in 2021.
This Ecosystem Growth round also sets us up for success in a few key areas that have been lacking, including, but not limited to:
B2B advancement;
Avalanche and Polygon ecosystem partnerships;
Scaling on a crowded and competitive BSC;
Market awareness;
And staffing.
In our look back at 2021 and forward to 2022 we hinted at explorations into GameFi, SocialFi, and DAO’s. Almost nothing of what we do moving forward will be done alone. It’ll either be done with teams entering the space, incubations and/or accelerations of raw talent that wishes to leverage our technology to build something great. We’ve been grinding and building since 2020 and learned that without a collective approach to building, it’s not possible to go far. Our mantra of Together is Better does ring true in how we plan to tackle 2022 and beyond.
We’re super thrilled to reveal our early backers and new backers to the community. It’s something that’s been asked from time to time and the reason we waited to do it was that we wanted to build first, prove ourselves to the industry, and show that good code, a culture of shipping, and organic community support are the pillars of a successful company. While we deeply admire and respect our backers, we shamelessly push a community-first agenda and will continue to do so.
Hot Cross is a bit of an enigma. We started as a purely web3 infra team, we then dipped our toes into B2C applications, and we are now heavily skewed towards the B2C side of web3 multi-chain and cross-chain building because we find that applications make people happy, and when people are happy we are also happy.
Trends, new wacky ideas, serious (and nonsense) things that we never thought about before seeing them pop up; all of these are interesting to us because are builders at heart. Along with that, we realize that none of it would have been possible without the support from our security auditors, who are the best in the industry. This includes Beosin, SlowMist, Omniscia, Zokyo, PeckShield, and CertiK.
What’s next? Much of the same but better.
IHO’s and launchpads will get interesting. We’ll deploy our suite to Avalanche and Polygon starting with Cross Pool 2 and IHO’s, as well as Cross Yield. We’ll incubate and accelerate new ideas into the space using HOTCROSS (and, when possible, HOTDOG) as a means of acquiring access to new products.
We also plan to bring Cross Bosses and the ecosystem that will develop around it as ubiquitous as possible. NFT’s are a large part of our roadmap during 2022 and that includes culture formation (flexing), tech demonstration (staking, NFT’s on multiple chains, etc.), AR/Metaverse plays (putting Bosses in other worlds, not just online), access creation (NFT’s as unlocks), and much more. We’re passionate about the NFT space and have been since the launch of Cross Mint on six blockchains last year.
In short, we don’t do roadmaps (todos are so much easier to handle), we avoid the fancy, and we promise nothing but excellence every single day that we do work. Say little, ship a lot. It’s the Hot Cross Way.
We’d like to thank our new onboarded backers and will release the new HOTCROSS emission schedule next week; it’s softer than the original schedule with early investors agreeing to longer vesting on their positions to ensure that 2022 is a year where Hot Cross, our community, and our new set of backers are also able to thrive.