LayerZero Raises $135 Million to Develop Protocol Enabling Multichain DApps
LayerZero, a startup that is working on a protocol to enable decentralized applications (DApps) to operate across multiple blockchains, has announced that it has raised $135 million in its most recent funding round. The blockchain company is now valued at $1 billion, and the funding will be used to accelerate the development of its protocol. The round was led by prominent venture capital firms and investors, such as Andreessen Horowitz, FTX Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Uniswap Labs, Tiger Global, PayPal Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and others.
LayerZero Labs is aiming to bring together a variety of applications, including non-fungible tokens (NFTs), gaming, marketplaces, and media apps, so that they can operate across multiple blockchain platforms. Potential use cases for LayerZero include decentralized finance (DeFi) applications that allow borrowing, trading, and lending across multiple blockchains, as well as media DApps and games that can process high-throughput transactions on a single blockchain, while buying and selling NFTs on other blockchains within the most liquid markets.
Following the beta launch of LayerZero, the company recently introduced Stargate, a cross-chain liquidity transfer protocol. Within 10 days of its launch, Stargate had secured more than $3.4 billion in assets and facilitated over $264 million in transfers via LayerZero. The next step for the developers is to integrate the LayerZero protocol with non-Ethereum Virtual Machine blockchains like Terra and Solana.
