Quick take:
- Tessera closed a $20 million Series A round earlier this summer.
- Its existing social channels will switch over to the refreshed branding over the next few days.
- Tessera plans to roll out its V2 protocol in October.
Collective NFT ownership platform, Fractional, announced on Wednesday that it has rebranded to Tessera to improve the sense of ownership for users. At the same time, it also announced that it has completed a $20 million Series A funding round, led by Paradigm.
Paradigm also led Fractional’s $7.9 million seed round last year. The latest funding round was closed earlier this summer and other investors in the round included Focus Labs, Uniswap Labs Ventures, E Girl Capital, Yunt Capital, and over 50 angel investors including the Laus, Keyboard Monkey, and DC Investor.
Co-founded in 2021 by Andy Chorlian, who serves as the platform’s CEO, Tessera – then known as Fractional – enables users to collectively own blue-chip NFT collections through fractionalisation. Some of the collections on the platform include CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Pudgy Penguins and Cool Cats.
Besides NFT projects, decentralised autonomous organisations like Free Ross DAO used the platform to raise funds for the legal defence of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, while Ukraine DAO also used the platform to raise $6.75 million worth of ETH to fight the Russian invasion.
Chorlian told Decrypt that the platform’s initial name was “on the nose” and conveyed the meaning of collectively owning digital assets. However, it never quite stuck in users’ minds as they would call it Fractionalize, Fractal.art or even Fractal, the name of Twitch co-founder Justin Kan’s gaming NFTs platform.
Fractional’s existing social channels will switch over to the refreshed branding over the next few days. A Tessera spokesperson told The Block that the new name feels more representative of the platform as it grows into its next phase.
“We hope to help build a world where anyone can have the opportunity to collectively own and govern things they value, without reliance on central gatekeepers to execute decisions and actions on their behalf,” Tessera wrote in a blog post.
Tessera is planning to launch its V2 protocol in October to give users an NFT that represents ownership of a project instead of the Ethereum ERC-20 tokens Fractional has been issuing, meaning that all the fractions of a project would be NFTs as well.
Chorlian believes that the new protocol would give users an improved sense of ownership and better represent the platform’s proposition. Tessera plans to implement its V2 protocol in a trial run with NFT project, Nouns, before launching it in October. It will expand to include more NFT collections and projects and explore Layer-2 scaling solutions to reduce transaction fees.
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