Rome Announces Launch of Native Token ROME, Raising $9 Million in Total Funding

According to Deep Tide TechFlow, on October 13, the cross-chain interoperability protocol Rome Protocol announced the launch of its native token, ROME. The protocol aims to connect the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with Solana, enabling Solidity smart contracts to achieve atomic settlement with Solana-native programs and assets within a single transaction. The protocol's underlying program is already running on the Solana mainnet and has been audited by Halborn. In terms of token utility, ROME will serve as the native gas token for the Rome mainnet chain. Additionally, a portion of the fee revenue generated from all supported on-chain transactions will be allocated, with half retained or used to repurchase ROME on the open market and deposited into a non-sellable reserve vault. The official statement clarified that this announcement does not constitute a public token sale, and details regarding supply and issuance plans will be disclosed later. To date, Rome Protocol has raised $9 million in funding, with investors including Portal Ventures, Hack VC, HashKey, Anagram, Robot Ventures, and Bankless Ventures. Angel investors include Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Austin Federa, Santiago Santos, and others. Currently, its tech stack has been open-sourced on GitHub, and the team is developing Solana zkEVM and Canton zkEVM, which use Solana as the sole settlement and data availability layer.