‘Users Need Safety’: Former SpaceX Manager Raises $4.2M for Crypto Platform Stackup

Stackup, an enterprise-grade platform for managing on-chain business operations, said on Friday that it secured $4.2 million in seed funding.

The Los Angeles-based firm, which previously built account abstraction tech for Coinbase and Trust Wallet, said it will use the funds to further develop its platform, which gives businesses “centralized control of decentralized assets,” according to the company’s website.

Stackup’s seed funding round was led by venture capital firm 1kx, with participation from Y Combinator and Digital Currency Group, among three other firms. 

Stackup was co-founded by CTO Hazim Jumali, an Ethereum Foundation grantee, and CEO John Rising, a former senior mission manager at Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In the overlap between crypto and aerospace engineering, Rising told Decrypt that precision is key.

Four months after he graduated from college, while working at Virgin Galactic, Rising was standing next to a pilot’s family when a mishap “caused the vehicle to break up in the sky.” Despite extensive designing and testing, the pilot lost his life.

“We had spent so much time making sure the machine works perfectly that we disregarded the most important part of the system as a whole: that a human is operating it,” Rising said. “Builders in crypto tend to really think about security, which is about preventing unauthorized access, when really users need safety.”

Account abstraction, which debuted on Ethereum’s mainnet in 2023, allows users to create non-custodial wallets as programmable smart contracts. Through features including easy wallet recovery and signless transactions, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin once said that the goal is to try and make crypto wallets as simple as using email.

Because account abstraction allows for wallets with custom logic, Rising said Stackup supports features that businesses need, such as spending limits for accounts, the ability to specify who can receive funds, or reviewing transactions in bulk before sending them with one click. 

Among other features, like the ability to connect a bank account to a wallet for seamless transfers, the goal is for Stackup to prevent catastrophic on-chain failures, Rising said.

For the average SpaceX launch, $60 million worth of cargo may be on the line, Rising said. Earlier this year, a security incident at crypto exchange Bybit resulted in a $1.4 billion hack.

“Imagine if SpaceX had 20 launch failures?” he asked. “It’s the same amount of loss in dollar terms.”

Although 3,000 individuals are involved in a SpaceX launch, Rising said that the team at Stackup is much more limited. Currently, the company is piloted by a group of four.

Edited by James Rubin