Gelato

Gelato is a blockchain infrastructure platform that offers rollup deployment, gasless transaction tooling, and smart contract automation. Founded in 2019 by developers Hilmar Orth and Luis Schliesske — who first collaborated at hackathons like ETHParis and ETHBerlin — the project began as a decentralized automation layer for Ethereum smart contracts. By late 2023 it had evolved into a full-stack infrastructure provider, with rollup-as-a-service becoming its flagship offering.

From Automation to Rollups

Gelato's earliest product was a smart contract automation network that allowed protocols to schedule and trigger on-chain transactions without running centralized bots. DeFi applications including Aave, PancakeSwap, QuickSwap, and Synthetix's Infinex used the service for automated liquidations, limit orders, and Uniswap V3 position management. Gelato claimed roughly 80% market share in the smart contract automation niche during this period.

In late 2023, the team pivoted toward rollup-as-a-service (RaaS). The shift reflected broader trends in the Ethereum ecosystem, where teams and enterprises increasingly wanted their own application-specific chains built on battle-tested execution environments rather than deploying directly on Ethereum mainnet. Gelato's entry into RaaS was validated in October 2024 when The Block reported that the company powers Ink, the Layer 2 network built by the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange. Ink launched on the OP Stack and joined Optimism's Superchain ecosystem, posting 2.5 million externally owned accounts, over $100 million in total value locked, and more than 70 million transactions by the time Gelato shared the metrics.

Infrastructure Products

Gelato's current product suite centers on three areas: rollup deployment, gasless transactions, and account abstraction.

Rollup-as-a-Service. Gelato's RaaS platform supports deployment on four rollup frameworks: Arbitrum Orbit, OP Stack, Polygon CDK, and Succinct. Operators can choose settlement layers on Ethereum, Base, or Arbitrum, and select from multiple data availability providers including Celestia, EigenDA, Avail, and NEAR. The company claims its "Snap Deploy" feature allows a new rollup to go live in under five minutes. Gelato Turbo, its proprietary sequencer, targets sub-100 milliseconds for block times and advertises 400 megagas per second of throughput. The platform is marketed with a 99.99% uptime SLA and 24/7 monitoring, and comes bundled with a unified dashboard covering observability, billing, and block exploration.

Beyond the technical stack, Gelato provides an integrated marketplace of wallet providers, authentication services, and ecosystem tooling — including Privy, Dynamic, Web3Auth, ZeroDev, Thirdweb, and Safe — that rollup operators can activate without separate integrations. Account abstraction (both ERC-4337 smart accounts and the newer EIP-7702 standard) is included by default.

The platform also supports one-click sovereign Layer 1 deployment on Avalanche, extending Gelato's reach beyond the Ethereum rollup ecosystem into fully independent chains.

Paymaster and Bundler. Gelato's Paymaster and Bundler product lets developers sponsor gas fees on behalf of users, or configure users to pay transaction costs in any ERC-20 token rather than the native gas token. It operates across more than 100 EVM-compatible chains and supports both ERC-4337 and EIP-7702 transaction flows. Gemini Wallet uses Gelato's Paymaster to power gasless transactions for its users, making it a production reference for major centralized exchange integrations.

Gasless SDK. The Gasless SDK unifies smart wallet capabilities — EIP-7702 support, ERC-4337 support, transaction sponsorship, and call batching — into a single integration. Gelato has extended SDK support to TRON and Solana in addition to EVM chains, broadening the addressable audience beyond Ethereum-native developers.

Relayer API. For teams that do not need the full SDK, Gelato offers a direct API for gasless transaction relaying. A private RPC product rounds out the infrastructure catalog, providing high-performance access to on-chain data with failover support.

Clients and Ecosystem

Gelato's most prominent enterprise deployment remains Kraken's Ink, but the client list includes other notable names. Fox News built a Layer 2 called "Verify" using Gelato's infrastructure to handle ZK-powered content verification. Aave and Sky (formerly MakerDAO) have used Gelato automation products. Protocol-level integrations include LayerZero, Across, Stargate, and Circle's CCTP.

The company positions its bundled middleware stack — covering oracles, indexers, account abstraction, block explorers, and wallet tooling — as a differentiator from bare-rollup competitors like Conduit and Caldera, arguing that integrated tooling creates switching costs that purely technical rollup deployment does not.

Funding and Backing

Gelato has raised $23.2 million across four rounds. A $1.2 million seed in September 2020, led by IOSG Ventures with participation from Galaxy Digital, was followed by an $11 million Series A in September 2021 led by Dragonfly Capital with ParaFi Capital, Nascent, and IDEO CoLab Ventures. A bridge round from IOSG in December 2023 supported the pivot toward RaaS. In October 2024, coinciding with the Kraken Ink announcement, Hack VC led an $11 million Series A extension with Animoca Brands, IOSG Ventures, and Bloccelerate VC participating. Aave founder Stani Kulechov invested in early rounds.

Gelato also conducted a public token sale in September 2021, raising $5 million through the GEL token. GEL is used for governance and staking, though independent analysis has noted that its on-chain utility remains limited relative to the scope of the platform.

Scale

As of the figures published on its website, Gelato reports more than one billion total transactions processed, 4.5 million daily transactions, support for more than 100 chains, and $600 million in total value secured. The company has over 50 rollups live on its infrastructure and lists more than 500 applications as customers.