Rhinestone Announces Pre-Seed Round
Rhinestone Raises Pre-Seed Round from 1kx, Lattice, Safe, and Heartcore to unlock modular account abstraction
We founded Rhinestone earlier this year to empower developers to build powerful onchain products that are uncompromising in web3 values. We believe that smart accounts are the platform for achieving this. They enable features like passkeys for signing, session keys for streamlined UX, and daily transaction limits for enhanced user security. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
However, today there are significant barriers to the adoption of smart accounts, including developer complexity, security, and a lack of simple feature customization, leading to vendor lock-in and ecosystem fragmentation. These challenges paint a picture of a homogenous smart account ecosystem where building novel features is costly, expensive audits disincentivize experimentation, and high switching costs increase user adoption risk.
Enter modular smart accounts. Modular smart accounts open up the programmable nature of smart accounts to any third party. This allows developers to focus on building self-contained components that extend the functionality of the user’s account to power novel product experiences. We believe modularity will pave the way for smart accounts to become a new platform for product innovation.
At Rhinestone, we’re building infrastructure to support an onchain ecosystem of modules: an interoperability layer between accounts, modules, and users that enables portable, secure, and extensible smart accounts. The platform enables developers to distribute and monetize their modules, and for users or dapp developers to discover and install them. Today, we support Safe, Biconomy, and ZeroDev’s Kernel, which represents over 95% of the smart account market.
Last month, we announced our partnership with Biconomy to bring about a plug-and-play embedded wallet for their customers via the Module Store — a marketplace of smart account modules that unlock specific dapp experiences and transform web3 UX. These modules are built by any developer and audited by a trusted network of security entities, transforming Biconomy’s embedded wallet into a platform for innovation.
The Module Store will be seeded by a set of UX-simplifying modules built by Biconomy and Rhinestone. Apps like Rage Trade and CapX already utilize Biconomy’s session key module to streamline DeFi actions. Players like Silence Laboratories and MoonChute are experimenting with the use of modules to distribute novel services. We’re excited to see how third-party developers, both on the module and application side, utilize Rhinestone’s platform to unlock new product experiences.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce our pre-seed, with the support of 1kx, Safe, Lattice, and Heartcore, as well as participation from some outstanding individuals within the ecosystem, including Calvin Lui (Chief Strategy Officer, EigenLayer), Georgios Vlachos (Co-Founder, Axelar), and Waikit Lau (Lau Ventures). This marks a major milestone in our journey to unlock smart accounts for developers in pursuit of a new self-sovereign digital era.
If you’re a developer and share our vision, find us on X or drop us your email to find out how to contribute or use the Module Store. If you’re a user, sign up for the waitlist on our website.
