LayerZero Labs, a firm that develops protocol to enable omnichain decentralized applications, or dApps, to span multiple blockchains had declared On Wednesday that it raised $135 million in its latest funding round which was led by Andreessen Horowitz, FTX Ventures, and Sequoia Capital.

Other participants of the round were Coinbase Ventures, PayPal Ventures, Tiger Global, and Uniswap Labs. LayerZero Labs is valued at $1 billion and this funding round will accelerate the development of cross-chain dApps powered by LayerZero, a decentralized omnichain interoperability protocol.

According to the company, during the last few years, there is an increase in demand for decentralized-based applications on cost-effective blockchains like games, lending and saving protocols, token exchanges, and NFT marketplaces and media apps. Infrastructure to support the cross-chain also remain low. Across different chains, users, data, and liquidity are fragmented. LayerZero aims to resolve this issue by providing an omnichain interoperability protocol that unites dApps across disparate blockchains. Through the fund, applications such as gaming, nonfungible tokens, marketplaces, media apps, etc., can be integrated across multiple chains.

LayerZero will enable to include new use cases including decentralized finance applications utilizing trading, borrowing, and lending across multiple blockchains; games. media dApps having high-throughput transactions relocated to one blockchain while buying and selling NFTs onto other blockchains with the most liquid markets will also be enabled through LayerZero. On layer 0 solutions other projects including Polkadot and Cosmos, are also working to assist scale blockchain networks.

Last year 2021 in April LayerZero Labs raised $2 million in a seed funding round and in September $6 million Series A round.

After the beta launch of LayerZero, recently the company introduced a cross-chain liquidity transfer protocol Stargate which is built on its generic messaging. In addition to solving the Bridging Trilemma, Stargate provides an instant guarantee of finality and unified liquidity across chains in native assets. As per the company after introduction within 10 days, Stargate has surpassed $3.4 billion in assets secured with over $264 million in transfers over LayerZero.  It is the developers' next step to integrate the LayerZero protocol with blockchains other than Ethereum Virtual Machines like Solana (SOL) and Terra (LUNA). Ryan Zarick, CTO and co-founder of LayerZero Labs, gave the following remarks: "Users will interact with omnichain dApps that exist on multiple blockchains, which will seamlessly communicate over LayerZero without the user even realizing it."

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Indrani Bose

CBW - External Analyst

INDIA