Archetype is excited to lead Rated's $12.888M Series A round.

Data is the new oil, or so we’ve been told. On the ground floor of Ethereum lies a critical network of validator nodes, tasked with facilitating millions of weekly user transactions and securing billions of dollars worth of value. As distributed networks and blockchains continue to disrupt systems and perform increasingly complex and critical tasks, the need for understanding the effectiveness of these machines grows. Today, however, we have almost no way of evaluating validator performance. This is not just a coordination problem, but a growing security risk. The lack of accessible data around nodes and their operators is keeping users, builders, investors, and other validators in the dark about the very health of the network. 

As Rated’s founder, Elias Simos, explained in a 2022 tweet, “As I was traversing through my Bison Trails and later Coinbase Cloud journey, I kept stumbling across the same issue; I needed vital data about performance, risk and externalities around nodes. And I was never able to access that data with ease.”

This is where Rated comes into play, aiming to be the guardian of infrastructure and machine level data integrity in the decentralized world. 

Why does this matter? 

At Archetype, we believe that transparency, security, and efficiency are critical to the health of decentralized networks. A decentralized ecosystem thrives on trust, and trust–whether through social or blockchain consensus–is built on reputation. Rated’s mission to build “Reputation for Machines” is not just innovative, but essential. The standards of trust and transparency that Rated is building will lay the foundation for a more robust and reliable decentralized future.

Rated: Shining Light on Ethereum

Rated’s network explorer clearly lays out validator metrics like network penetration, consensus client distribution, and block space distribution. The explorer also provides an overview of the entire network, including global metrics like inclusion delay, participation rate, and number of active validators. 

Rated goes beyond simply laying out the numbers by, well, rating them. They take all of this data into account to assign a network effectiveness rating to each pool, node operator, deposit address, and the network itself. 

This source of truth for validator quality provides much needed insight and common ground for making sense of Ethereum’s health as a network.

If You Want to Go Far, Go Together

Boasting an average 12k MAUs through their Explorer in Q3 and 14.5M API calls in August 2023 alone, Rated has become invaluable to developers, enterprises, pools, node operators, referential applications, and Ethereum at large.

In true crypto spirit, Rated has baked in transparency as a core value from day one. The team is currently developing their own open source strategy and exploring how to balance progressive decentralization with the high quality product they’re already known for. 

Bringing this all to life is critical to Ethereum’s success, and it couldn’t be in better hands. Our journey with Rated began years ago while Elias was a Protocol Specialist at Bison Trails (acquired by Coinbase in 2021) with an affinity for insightful dashboards. His charisma, passion, and thoughtfulness around protocol design made for wonderfully engaging conversations that always left us with fresh perspectives on the ecosystem. 

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Rated Today

Following Rated's Seed round of $2.5M raised in 2022 from our friends at 1confirmation, Elias brought in long-time friend Aris Koliopoulos, an expert in functional programming and real-time systems, to complement his engineering prowess.Together, they form a team that is more than capable of realizing Rated's ambitious vision of building the most complete view of Ethereum infrastructure.

Since launching in 2022, Rated has seen nearly 150k unique visitors on its network explorer (presently tallying to ~12k MAUs), 60M calls on its API spread across 45+ integrations, as well as partnerships and integrations with leaders and innovators in the Ethereum Staking ecosystem including Lido, Liquid Collective, MetaMask Institutional, Chorus one, and Nexus Mutual. 

Thank you again to Elias Simos, Aris Koliopoulos, and the rest of the Rated team for trusting us to help you on your journey. We look forward to accelerating the decentralized future with you.

Rated is growing quickly and plans to support more networks this year (stay tuned…) To learn more about their products or get in touch with the team, check out their website or reach out to them on Twitter.

• Want to Learn More? Check out their explorer, API, or docs.
• Want to Join the Team? Rated is actively hiring across technical and non-technical roles. 

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Disclaimer:

This post is for general information purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any investment and should not be used in the evaluation of the merits of making any investment decision. It should not be relied upon for accounting, legal or tax advice or investment recommendations. You should consult your own advisers as to legal, business, tax, and other related matters concerning any investment or legal matters. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by Archetype. This post reflects the current opinions of the authors and is not made on behalf of Archetype or its affiliates and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Archetype, its affiliates or individuals associated with Archetype. The opinions reflected herein are subject to change without being updated.

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