By Chris Ahn and Breck Stodghill

Developer interest in web3 has grown massively over the last few years. Web3 monthly active developers are at an all time high with more joining in 2021 than any year prior. This level of developer interest has grown through multiple cycles, bringing with it innovation across numerous ecosystems and use cases. New blockchains like Polygon, Solana, NEAR, and Aptos have emerged alongside new use cases like DeFi, NFTs, and gaming.

New networks and use cases inject vibrancy into the web3 ecosystem. However, they also introduce greater complexity for builders in the form of new virtual machines, programming languages, standards, and best practices to consider. In just a few years, new programming languages like Rust and Move have emerged alongside Solidity, and new techniques like gasless minting have become best practice. We anticipate that as innovation and developer interest in web3 continues to grow, so will this complexity.

As a result, developer tools that simplify this complexity will be immensely important in bringing the next million developers into the ecosystem. Thirdweb offers a full stack of useful developer tools including pre-built and audited smart contracts, SDKs, and dashboards to help developers create, deploy, and manage their web3 apps. Thirdweb already supports six different blockchains (with more coming soon) across multiple programming languages. In addition, thirdweb offers a comprehensive UI component library and auth solution to make it simple for front end developers to build beautiful user experiences on their smart contracts. Once contracts are deployed, thirdweb’s dashboards and analytics tools ensure that every developer can monitor their smart contract’s onchain activity. By offering an end-to-end solution from creation to post-deploy management, thirdweb saves developers time and costly errors.

Great developer tooling is nuanced and requires an experienced and thoughtful team to get right. Furqan and Steven are an exceptional duo with the right track record to tackle this problem. Furqan has prior, proven experience building a developer platform as the former co-founder and CTO of AppLovin. His approach and passion to building product is evident; in deciding which initial features to build into thirdweb, he spoke with 500 potential customers to fully internalize their needs. Steven is an expert in community building as the former founder and CEO of Social Chain. The thirdweb community truly shines as an authentic and passionate place for builders to share ideas and help each other. In fact, the result of this community-first ethos is the reason why the platform is open source, 100% on-chain, and every smart contract deployed using thirdweb is 100% owned by the creator’s wallet.

Today, we’re proud to announce that Haun Ventures is leading the Series A in thirdweb with participation from other investors including Coinbase Ventures, Shopify, Protocol Labs, Polygon, and other strategic angels. We’re long term supporters of the web3 developer ecosystem and are excited for thirdweb to make web3 development more accessible. Welcome thirdweb!

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