Lasso Labs announces its $4.2M initial fundraise & beta availability

SAN MATEO, Calif., Oct. 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- We're excited to share that Lasso Labs raised $4.2M in a round led by Electric Capital. Lasso makes it easy to discover and create utility for digital assets like NFTs.

In addition to Electric Capital's involvement, this round includes Ethereal Ventures, Village Global, OpenSea, and Page One Ventures, as well as individuals such as Sriram Krishnan (Kearny Jackson), 0x650d, Chandan Lodha (CoinTracker), Will Papper (SyndicateDAO), David Choi (MetaStreet), Soso Sazesh (43), leaders from Coinbase, Google, Phantom, Celestia, and more.

We believe that NFTs will be the most common form of verifiable digital ownership: the native SKU type of the evolving internet. We're particularly bullish about NFTs that provide holders with ongoing value across digital, physical, and hybrid contexts. This design space is vast: encompassing online & IRL access, claims on products, airdrops, community memberships, and rights such as governance, IP, and royalties.

Lasso aims to accelerate this trend towards NFTs with tangible utility. Even in the current bear cycle, there is significant momentum in this direction. We've indexed thousands of NFT projects, along with associated off-chain data. Across the Top 500 projects on Ethereum (by all-time volume), more than 70% have already provided at least one token-based benefit to their communities, with more to come as utility becomes essential to existing projects and new drops alike.

Beta launch on Ethereum
Today, we're also announcing an invite-only beta program for our first product: a discovery platform that gives users a real-time view of any access, offers, rights, or other opportunities tied to specific NFTs.

It's currently hard for individuals to understand the utility attached to their NFTs; it's equally difficult for project creators to introduce utility after their tokens are minted. This is because records of utility are unstructured, evolving, and off-chain, while NFTs live on-chain. We've also heard from many creators that token-gating infrastructure itself remains a challenge to set up and maintain properly.

Lasso's data platform ingests real-time data from on-chain and off-chain sources (social media APIs and websites), automatically tags instances of utility, and populates our utility registry with structured records. Once verified, these are visible to people using Lasso.

Rich metadata around how NFTs can be used, and how consumers engage with these assets, enables a far more expansive knowledge graph. This, in turn, enables a greater degree of personalization, with next-level search and recommendation experiences, as well as the ability to browse with token-specific or utility-centric intent. Over time, this will be a key differentiator in Lasso's product.

The road ahead
We're focused on establishing Lasso as the best place to discover and interact with programmable digital assets: beyond speculation to deep engagement with the functionality provided by any NFT.

To that end, Lasso provides real-time information flows that make it easy to stay current with new opportunities, as well as approachable analytics that improve understanding of different communities and assets. Lastly, we make it simple to take action on airdrops, mints, product claims, content exclusives, event RSVPs, voting, and more.

Our ultimate goal is to build the most robust foundation and universal standards for digital asset utility, thus addressing the needs of both consumers and creators. We'll be expanding access to our beta over the coming weeks, and adding functionality, as well as support for other NFT ecosystems beyond Ethereum. Follow us on Twitter for ongoing updates and market insights, and join the beta waitlist from Lasso's site.

SOURCE Lasso Labs