Today's News |
Vancouver-based Blockchain Startup LayerZero Labs Reportedly Raising Major $100 Million Financing Round at $1 Billion Valuation
Monday, December 6, 2021Company Profile | Follow Company
Vancouver, BC, December 6, 2021--(T-Net)--US tech industry news service The Information has reported that Vancouver-based blockchain startup company LayerZero Labs is reportedly raising a major new $100 million financing round co-led by Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and crypto trading firm FTX, at a roughly $1 billion valuation, according to their sources.
LayerZero is currently building an omnichain interoperability protocol that unites decentralized applications across disparate blockchains.
For more technical details on exactly what the company is working on, see their Medium post here.
Binance Labs , the venture capital and incubator of Binance, and Multicoin Capital co-led a US $6 Million funding round for LayerZero earlier this year in September 2021. Sino Global Capital, Defiance, Delphi Digital, Robot Ventures, Spartan, Hypersphere Ventures, Protocol Ventures, Gen Block Capital, Echelon Capital also participated in that round.
LayerZero in brief is a new interoperability protocol that connects disparate blockchains. Interoperability hinges on passing messages between chains; current solutions achieve this with a middle-chain (hub-and-spoke model) such as Polkadot or running pairwise on-chain light nodes such as Cosmos IBC.
The former solution centralizes security around a single hub, allowing for cheap transactions at the cost of a single point of failure. The latter achieves high security with on-chain validation but is both capital and resource-intensive. LayerZero brings the best of both worlds together with a novel on-chain "Ultra Light Node," which achieves the security of a light node with the cost-effectiveness of middle chains.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Editor's Note: See the full story on ZeroLabs financing round on The Information website here.
-------------------------------------------------------------
"DeFi applications have spread out and deployed across multiple chains due to high fees and evolving investors preferences. This has led to severe fragmentation across the market. You can currently trade on Sushi using Ethereum, Moonbeam, Fantom, xDAI, and Binance Smart Chain, and more chains are coming. While all of these applications are Sushi, but none alone is Sushi. LayerZero solves this problem by uniting liquidity across chains and making it possible to transact in, out, and across disparate networks with ease," said Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder, LayerZero.
LayerZero said in a release earlier this year that it plans to support Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, Arbitrum and Optimism at launch. It will add support for more EVM chains and non-EVM chains, such as Solana, Polkadot, and Algorand, in the months following launch.
LayerZero achieves speed, security, and cost-efficiency by performing the same validation as an on-chain light node but instead of keeping all block headers sequentially, block headers are streamed on-demand by decentralized oracles. This is a fundamentally new interoperability model that improves security by coordinating validation between nodes and oracles. LayerZero currently leverages Chainlink and Band Protocol for oracles but was designed to be oracle agnostic.
LayerZero paves the way for the first omnichain applications, opening the door for lending, AMMs, governance and much more to become truly chain agnostic," said Kyle Samani, Managing Partner, Multicoin Capital. "Dapp developers no longer have to write chain-specific code; instead, they can just use LayerZero to develop one interface that sends messages to all chains. Anything that wants to share or consolidate state across multiple chains—which is practically every application today—should be using LayerZero."
LayerZero said in September that it would use the funds raised in their earlier round to further the development of LayerZero endpoints across the ecosystem and drive the adoption of the protocol.
About LayerZero Labs
We're building LayerZero, an omnichain interoperability protocol.
Company Snapshot |
||
Vancouver (Other Tech Sectors)
|
Other Recent Company News |
|||||||||||||||||||
|