Tharsis Labs, which develops the Evmos cross-blockchain tool to connect Ethereum and Cosmos, raised $27M via a token sale led by Polychain Capital
Polychain Capital led the funding raise to accelerate the cross-chain decentralized app platform — Tharsis Labs - the core developer of Evmos …
Context & Ripple Effects
Polychain Capital has made leading private token sales a signature move: it backed Solana Labs' $314M token raise in June 2021 and led Anoma Foundation's $26M round that November, both at the peak of the token-financing cycle. The Tharsis Labs deal extends that playbook into a much colder market — Polychain reportedly lost roughly $200M of investor funds this year, yet is still writing lead checks.
What makes this round notable is the target: Evmos is infrastructure connecting Ethereum and Cosmos, two ecosystems that have largely competed for developers rather than interoperate. The bet also aged well within Polychain's own portfolio logic — by April 2023 the firm was back leading a $42M round for Berachain, another Cosmos SDK Layer 1.
First-order effects
- Tharsis Labs gets $27M to accelerate Evmos development, giving the core team behind the Ethereum-Cosmos bridge runway to ship while rival interoperability projects are cutting spend.
- Polychain deepens its position as the default lead investor for Cosmos SDK token launches, now holding anchor stakes across Evmos, Anoma, and later Berachain.
Second-order effects
- Other Cosmos SDK teams gain a pricing benchmark: a $27M token sale in November 2022's downturn signals that lead-tier funds will still finance interchain infrastructure, pressuring competitors to raise on similar terms or concede the interoperability niche.
- Ethereum-side middleware players like Alchemy, which connect dapps to underlying chains, face a funded alternative route where cross-chain messaging replaces single-chain API access as the integration layer.
Third-order effects
- If token sales keep outperforming equity rounds for infrastructure during drawdowns, crypto financing stays structurally tilted toward token-first structures — with lead investors like Polychain acting as de facto gatekeepers for which chains get liquidity.
- Sustained funding of Ethereum-Cosmos bridges points toward a multi-chain market where value accrues to interoperability layers rather than to any single base chain, though whether bridges capture that value or lose it to native cross-chain features remains an open question.
The trend: Private token sales led by a small set of specialist funds are becoming the recurring financing mechanism for Cosmos SDK infrastructure, even through market downturns.