LayerZero Labs, a firm that develops protocols to enable omnichain decentralized applications (DApps) to span multiple blockchains, announced that it raised $135 million in its latest funding round.
It has been reported that the deal values LayerZero Labs at $1 billion and will accelerate the 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.
However, it aims to unite applications such as gaming, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), marketplaces, media apps, and others so they are operable across multichain realms. Potential new use cases via LayerZero include decentralized finance (DeFi) applications utilizing trading, borrowing, and lending across multiple blockchains, games, and media DApps that have high-throughput transactions relocated to one blockchain while buying and selling NFTs onto other blockchains with the most liquid markets.
The report said that after the beta launch of LayerZero, the firm recently launched Stargate, a cross-chain liquidity transfer protocol. In just 10 days post-launch, LayerZero says that Stargate has surpassed $3.4 billion in assets secured, with over $264 million in transfers over LayerZero. The developers‘ next steps involve integrating the LayerZero protocol with non-Ethereum Virtual Machine blockchains such as Solana and Terra.
Ryan Zarick, the Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of LayerZero Labs, said:
“Users will interact with omnichain dApps that exist on multiple blockchains, which will seamlessly communicate over LayerZero without the user even realizing it.”
Thus, Ramnik Arora, an investor at FTX Ventures, added:
“LayerZero allows smart contracts on one chain to seamlessly and securely leverage the network of another chain, increasing the value of the entire blockchain ecosystem. The team is a rare combination of vision and technical execution.”
Source: Cointelegraph