LayerZero Labs an omnichain decentralized applications developer raised $135 million


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."

Indrani Bose
CBW - External Analyst
INDIA