Lore wages war on Etherscan with fresh 2.3M funding round
As seen in Decrypt.
Shuttle Labs, the entity behind the Lore Explorer and analytics platform, has successfully closed a 2.3M funding round. Money raised from this round, which was led by SALT.org, Arca, Balaji Srinivasan, and Floodgate among other notable backers and crypto-native angels, will go toward building Lore’s AI-enabled explorer and set of tooling designed to be used for analyzing EVM-compatible network.
A powerful user-first alternative
Block explorers are some of the most essential tools in Web3 because they are the user-facing destination for ensuring network transparency. Without publicly available block explorers, crypto loses its “verify don’t trust” ethos in a real way. This is because explorers allow users to quickly visualise a network’s activity through its transactions, verify smart contracts, and look up participants to see what they have been up to on-chain. They are also useful for builders, traders, researchers, and just about anyone looking to view and analyze on-chain data to source an insight.
However, according to the team at Lore:
“The current crop of tools serving this market are not only stale, but alienating. Etherscan, Blockchain.com, Blockscout, and Blockchair are a few of the many blockchain explorers currently in existence. We won’t get into the specific shortcomings, but they do little to help deliver on Web3’s true promise: an accessible, open, searchable (L)edger (O)f (Re)cord. And worse yet, they have no way to reward users, create lasting incentives, and build economies natively.”
Lore is launching at a time when crypto feels less transparent than ever before. Consumers and institutions alike have been burned badly by this last year of turmoil. Web3 is perceived as a black box with little public trust. The headlines of 2022 and 2023 are all you need as proof of this sentiment.
Lore’s aim is to change this perception. The team is on a mission to replace this current standard of intimidating and obscure hashes with a more powerful, modular solution that puts the user first. Its tooling is designed to provide both the beautiful simplicity demanded by average consumers and the high level of composability needed by seasoned degens. After spending time with the team, it becomes clear that their main goal is to empower the end user: choose information you want to see, and the level of detail that is important to you. The platform will handle the rest.
Speaking on why the team is building through a very severe bear market, co-founder and CEO Armaan Kalsi commented: “The pace of innovation hasn’t slowed. We are also seeing a proliferation of novel networks as layer 2s because of open source frameworks such as Optimism’s Bedrock stack and ZKsync. Incumbents aren’t ready to tool the long-tail in a way that aligns incentives, and open source alternatives feel fragmented. If we are not careful to unify the discovery of insights across these networks, Web3 will resemble a pre-Google internet—not ready to onboard millions, let alone billions.”
The Lore platform combines easy multichain discovery across all their supported networks in a single interface. The platform boasts powerful analytics, and real-time action automation to provide a cohesive search experience where users can easily find contracts, transactions, and analytical queries. This creates a new standard that ensures blockchains will no longer be intimidating and inaccessible to anyone.
Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI)
Lore is built as an AI-first solution, featuring deep large language models (LLMs) integration to make blockchains conversational. This is what makes it a powerful yet user-friendly solution for everyone, from traders and casual enthusiasts to engineers and analysts. Imagine asking a contract, wallet, or transaction for an insight, and then having it given to you in seconds.
CTO Brihu Sundararaman commented: “We wanted to make sure Lore capitalizes on the massive advances in AI in a way that doesn’t feel gimmicky, but meaningfully improves upon alternatives and provides the end user with utility that would not have existed before using LLMs. For us, it's not another buzzword, but a core part of the platform’s identity. We like to think of it as a block data concierge.”
On Lore, users have the option of translating transactions to simple but detailed English, provided by their LLM, trained on billions of transactions and protocol docs. Users can also create and modify analytical querying and visualisations of block data in natural language. The goal? Radical transparency, enabled by AI, to make sure stakeholders are protected. This means Web3 citizens can finally understand on-chain history legibly, and can gain the confidence needed to interact with public networks after a whirlwind year of uncertainty in the larger crypto space.
About Lore
Lore is an AI-first block data search engine that leverages LLMs to make blockchains understandable. Its mission is to replace the current block data explorer standard by building a platform that unifies the fragmented world of block data into a single, searchable interface, making blockchains unintimidating, accessible, and genuine sources of truth for all stakeholders.
Lore is co-founded by 2 Yale graduates and a dropout - Armaan Kalsi, Brihu Sundararaman, and Ryan Myher. The founding team has been researching in web3 since 2020, with members contributing to an academic Genomic data sharing protocol, NFT auction mechanics for physical art, collateralized lending protocols for future revenues, and hash exchanges respectively. For the last year, they have been laser focused on realizing their vision for a world where Lore becomes the multichain search and discovery engine for all on-chain raw data, interpretations, and insights, regardless of architecture and configuration.