ChainSafe Systems

Basics

• "We met at the Toronto Ethereum Developer Meetup that we now help co-organize. Our team supports a few community initiatives including the Görli testnet, University of Toronto Decentralized Tech Association, Blockchain Ryerson, UofT Blockchain Group and a few local hackathons!"
• Ethereum research and development startup
• Was one of the players (together with ETC Labs and The Ethereum Cooperative in making the ETC Atlantis hard fork get accepted.

Works on

• Has initiated DeNode
• Gossamer; "Implementation of the Polkadot Runtime Environment in Golang."
• Lodestar; "Ethereum 2.0 ecosystem written in TypeScript & AssemblyScript."
• Ethermint; "Implementation of Ethereum on Tendermint using Cosmos-SDK."
• Ethereum Classic; "Implemented the Atlantis and Aghartha hard forks into EthereumProject/go-ethereum."
• Görli & Kotti; "Cross-client proof-of-authority Ethereum testnets."
• ChainBridge; "Modular multi-directional blockchain bridge to interact with multiple networks."
• Aragon Chain (based on Tendermint)
• ChainSafe builds the bridge for Moonbeam (27-1-2021):

"ChainBridge is the a bridge between Ethereum and the Moonbeam parachain on Polkadot that will allow asset transfers between the two independent chains."

Current and former clients

As of 9-2019:

• Whiteblock
• Polymath
• AION
• George Brown College
• York University
• Shyft
• Arkillio

Team, Funding, partners, etc.

Team

• Aidan Hyman; CEO and founder
• Chris Fenos
• Colin Schwarz
• David Ansermino
• Dustin Brickwood
• Elizabeth Binks
• Gregory Markou
• Priom Chowdhury
• Stu Peters
• Fedrico Kullmer; ex-member, Fedrico joined Tendermint as an Intern in 2018. He later was promoted to software developer. He left Tendermint in 2020. He later worked at Kava Labs, Chainsafe and Interchain Foundation.

Funding

• From their blog (18-10-2022):

"We’re excited to announce that ChainSafe has secured US$18.75 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round. The investment was led by Round13 with participation from new investors NGC Ventures, HashKey Capital, Sfermion, Jsquare, and returning investors Digital Finance Group and Fenbushi Capital."

• According to their website their "open source R&D is supported by" (9-2019):

1. Ethereum
2. Web3
3. Interchain
4. Ethereum Cooperative
5. Ethereum Community Fund

• Got a grant from the Interchain Foundation (Cosmos) (29-6-2020).
• Got a grant from the Ethereum Foundation to continue the maintenance and further development of Web3JS (4-9-2020).

Partners

• Has links with the Ethereum Foundation since their whole team were one of the signatories on a leaked Ethereum Foundation document about maintaining cohesion ahead of its (at the time pending) Constantinople, Create2 fork.