On Wednesday, LayerZero Labs, a firm that develops protocols to enable all-chain decentralized applications, or dApps, to span multiple blockchains, announced that it has raised $135 million in its latest funding round. The deal values LayerZero Labs $1 billion and will accelerate development of its namesake protocol.
The round was led by notable venture groups and investors such as Sequoia Capital, FTX Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and with participation from Coinbase Ventures, PayPal Ventures, Tiger Global, Uniswap Labs, and more.
It aims to unify applications such as gaming, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, marketplaces, media apps, etc., so that they can operate in multi-chain sectors. Potential new use cases through LayerZero include: decentralized finance applications that use trade, lending and lending across multiple blockchains; Game and media dApps with high-throughput transactions are transferred to one blockchain while buying and selling NFTs on other blockchains with the most liquid markets.
Following the beta launch of LayerZero, the firm recently launched Stargate, a cross-chain liquidity transfer protocol. In just 10 days after launch, LayerZero says Stargate has passed $3.4 billion in secured assets, with over $264 million in transfers on LayerZero. The developers’ next steps include integrating the LayerZero protocol with non-Ethereum virtual machine blockchains such as Solana (SOL) and Terra (Luna). Ryan Zarick, CTO and co-founder of LayerZero Labs, provided the following comment:
“Users will interact with Omnichain dApps existing on multiple blockchains, which will seamlessly communicate on LayerZero without the user even realizing it.”
Meanwhile, Ramnik Arora, an investor at FTX Ventures, said:
“LayerZero allows smart contracts on one chain to seamlessly and securely leverage networks on the other, thereby increasing the value of the entire blockchain ecosystem. The team is a rare combination of vision and technical execution.”
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