Llama raises $6m to streamline smart contract access management

Llama, an access control and governance platform for smart contracts, has raised $6 million seed round from Founders Fund and Electric Capital. Other notable investors include Elad Gil (early investor in Stripe, Airbnb, Figma), Sandeep Nailwal (Cofounder, Polygon), Stani Kulechov (Founder, Aave), Will Gaybrick (President of Product, Stripe), Amplify Partners, and FJ Labs.

Smart contract applications have accrued billions of dollars in value locked and treasury holdings. However, securing and governing these protocols is still complex. Llama has launched a fullstack platform that makes access control and governance more effective and secure. It allows protocols to encode roles, permissions, and execution strategies to define workflows to take onchain actions. Actions could include upgrading a protocol, transferring funds, updating a registry, changing protocol parameters, or activating an emergency pause.

Shreyas Hariharan, Co-founder, Llama: "To scale our impact, we used our learnings to build the product we wish we had. In Llama, decentralization is achieved through access control. Each governance participant is granted the minimum amount of power to perform the function they are best suited to do."

Llama is designed for role-based governance. For example, a risk service provider could be given permission to update risk parameters subject to a delay period that allows the action to be vetoed by token holders. Similarly, an operations team could initiate an emergency pause that is executed immediately once a high approval threshold is met.

Austin Green, Co-founder, Llama: "Today, protocols are wasting precious engineering resources forking open-source frameworks and hacking together custom front-ends. They understand the benefit of a vertically integrated solution."

www.llama.xyz