Lava Network launches public mainnet with Filecoin, Starknet, Cosmos support

The public mainnet of modular infrastructure platform Lava Network is live, having launched on July 30 with support from some of the industry’s top players and projects.

Lava Network announced that Filecoin (FIL), Starknet Foundation and Cosmos Hub (ATOM) had all joined the phased public mainnet launch. Other projects that have also backed Lava Network are Evmos, Axelar, and Stargaze.

Lava is an incentive layer platform

The Lava Network is a protocol designed as an incentive layer that developers can leverage to bootstrap key infrastructure. Using Lava, ecosystems can create incentive pools and attract top infrastructure providers. Meanwhile, companies such as Google Cloud operate as RPC providers.

Any chain offers an incentive pool via Lava, scaling and optimizing it to suit their goals through remote procedure call (RPC) node operators. The team highlighted in a press release that the project’s testnet saw over 40 billion RPC requests processed.

“Lava Network’s incentive pools are decentralizing the NEAR RPC layer by creating a competitive market and bringing more providers. This has improved the experience for NEAR app developers and users,” Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol, said.

NEAR plans to leverage Lava Network more to expand with chain abstraction, Polosukhin noted.

$LAVA token launch and airdrop

Lava’s mainnet launch aims to bring into the market the native $LAVA token to further this incentive layer’s growth. Lava has outlined a $2 million incentive pool from the mainnet partner chains. Lava will also airdrop 55 million $LAVA tokens to the community, with this coming after an initial high float and capped supply.

“By going with this radically unique approach, the Lava Foundation is encouraging engagement and supporting decentralization,” Amir Aaronson, head of the Lava Foundation, said. Lava Network will support staking for its $LAVA holders.