Benny Giang, co-founder and CEO of Future Primitive, celebrates the company’s 2024 fundraise with co-founder Jayden Windle and the team in Los Angeles.
Future Primitive, the protocol-focused startup led by ERC-721 and ERC-6551 co-author Benny Giang, has closed a seed round of $8 million, the company confirmed Monday. Participation in the round came from a16z Crypto, Kindred Ventures, Hashed Ventures, SevenX Ventures, Archetype, and PTC Crypto, alongside a roster of more than two dozen angel investors drawn from the senior ranks of the Web3 industry. The company also confirmed it has been selected for the Fall 2024 cohort of the a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator, CSX.
The Standard Behind the Raise
The technical contribution at the center of the raise, ERC-6551, is the token-bound account standard Giang co-authored with Future Primitive co-founder and protocol engineer Jayden Windle. Deployed on the Ethereum mainnet in May 2023, the standard has become one of the more rapidly adopted proposals to move through the Ethereum standards process in recent memory. More than 31,000 token-bound accounts were created across EVM chains within months of deployment, according to data published on Dune Analytics, and implementations now exist on Base, Optimism, Zora, and Polygon. OpenSea and Lens Protocol have each integrated native support.
Building the Protocol Layer for Digital Ownership
Future Primitive’s pitch to investors is built around extending token-bound accounts into a cross-chain protocol for digital ownership. The thesis, in its simplest form, is that a non-fungible token should be able to function as its own wallet, absorb assets into its own account, and carry that account across any chain where the holder operates. The standard is the primitive. The company’s job is the infrastructure and the surface area that makes the primitive usable.
“NFTs have historically been static records of ownership,” Giang said in a statement accompanying the raise. “What we are trying to build is the protocol layer that lets them behave as agents, containers, and identities. The value they accumulate should travel with them. The chain they sit on should not define what they can do.”
Perma: A Film Roll Built on the Blockchain
The company’s first consumer application, a product called Perma, sits next to that infrastructure work as a proof point. Perma is a digital film roll issued as a non-fungible token. Each roll holds twenty-four shots. When the user captures an image, that photograph is minted into the film roll’s token-bound account, producing a collectible that contains its own archive rather than pointing at an external gallery. The roll, once filled, can be held, traded, or transferred, and its internal state travels with it.
“We wanted to ship something people could actually use,” Giang said. “A film roll is an object everyone understands. What is inside of it is where the interesting work happens. If the idea survives contact with real users, we have learned something that helps every other team building on 6551.”
Giang’s Road From Dapper Labs to Future Primitive
Giang’s history in the category predates most of the venture capital now chasing it. He was an early employee at what became Dapper Labs, where he spent roughly five years leading go-to-market work across CryptoKitties, Cheeze Wizards, and the launch trajectory for NBA Top Shot. He was a named contributor on the final EIP-721 specification, alongside William Entriken, Dieter Shirley, Jacob Evans, and Nastassia Sachs, and represented the project at dozens of industry conferences during the initial adoption of the standard. During his tenure, Dapper Labs raised $666 million in cumulative funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, Google Ventures, and Samsung, and reached a $7.6 billion valuation at its last disclosed round.
Giang left the company in October 2021 and co-founded Future Primitive with Steve Jang, a general partner at Kindred Ventures, and Windle, an engineer with prior work on open source tooling for the Ethereum ecosystem. The company has kept a small footprint, with a single-digit headcount split between New York and Toronto.
A Deep Angel List From Web3’s Operating Class
The angel list for the $8 million round is unusually deep by venture convention. The company confirmed participation from founders and early executives at Dapper Labs, OpenSea, Magic Eden, Yield Guild Games, Sky Mavis, Doodles, Azuki, ETHGlobal, OP Labs, Coinbase, Binance, MoonPay, Zynga, Double Jump Tokyo, and Com2uS, among others. The concentration of check-writers who have themselves operated consumer products in the category is the piece most observers have flagged as notable.
Giang is also an active angel investor and advisor elsewhere in the creator economy and Web3 stack. His disclosed positions include IYK, the NFC-to-blockchain hardware company that has raised $16.8 million with a16z Crypto as a lead investor; The Fabricant, the digital fashion studio that has raised $14 million; KLKTN, the K-pop and anime collectibles platform that has raised more than $10 million; and early-stage companies including AO Labs, Stems Labs, Lychee, Noware, and Computer Angel.
Where the $8M Is Going
The a16z CSX program, which will host Future Primitive in its Fall 2024 cohort, is a three-month residency in Los Angeles that has previously included Story Protocol, Proof of Play, and Privy, among others. Companies in the program receive an initial investment alongside structured mentorship and access to the firm’s operator network. Chris Dixon, the head of a16z crypto, has previously described the program as a vehicle for what he calls the protocol layer rather than the application layer, a framing that maps onto Future Primitive’s roadmap.
Capital from the round will go toward three areas, according to Giang. The first is engineering hires to expand the team, building the Perma client, and the underlying 6551 tooling. The second is partnership work with artists, brands, and institutions interested in issuing film rolls or other 6551-native objects. The third is continued research, including extensions to the standard and related work on cross-chain account portability.
Developer Momentum After the NFT Downturn
The timing of the raise coincides with a period of renewed developer interest in the NFT stack after a two-year contraction. Marketplace trading volume remains well below the peaks reached in 2021, but developer activity on token-bound account implementations has grown each quarter since the standard was finalized, according to data from Artemis and Token Terminal.
“Infrastructure is only useful if something is built on top of it,” Giang said. “We are trying to do both, and we are going to keep doing both until it is obvious what the pattern is.”
Future Primitive declined to share additional details on its roadmap beyond the initial Perma release.
