Vancouver’s LayerZero Labs announced today that it raised USD $135 million in a round co-led by Sequoia Capital, FTX Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz and with participation from Coinbase Ventures, PayPal Ventures, Tiger Global, Uniswap Labs, and more.
This funding round values LayerZero Labs at $1 billion and will accelerate the development of cross-chain decentralized applications (dApps) powered by LayerZero, a decentralized omnichain interoperability protocol.
Sequoia Capital’s Michelle Bailhe and Shaun Maguire shared the story of their partnership today in a blog post that is worth a read.
The night was October 22, 2021. We had been following Bryan Pellegrino, or Primo, for a while on Crypto Twitter, mostly because Bryan always had interesting things to say. There were also a few hints that he was building something interesting.
“This round is a massive step forward for LayerZero Labs and the unfolding interoperability landscape. We’ve brought some of the best and most well respected entities in the world together to accomplish the same goal: create the generic messaging layer that underpins all interoperability between blockchains,” said Bryan Pellegrino, CEO and co-founder, LayerZero Labs.
The explosion of the crypto ecosystem over the last several years has resulted in a greater demand to build high-throughput applications, like gaming, NFT marketplaces and media apps, on cost-effective blockchains. Yet the infrastructure to support this cross-chain world has fallen short, resulting in users, data and liquidity fragmented across applications deployed on different chains.
LayerZero solves this problem by providing an omnichain interoperability protocol that unites dApps across disparate blockchains.
“LayerZero unlocks a future of blockchains without borders. Users will interact with omnichain dApps that exist on multiple blockchains. These dApps will seamlessly communicate over LayerZero without the user even realizing it,” said Ryan Zarick, CTO and co-founder, LayerZero Labs.
Following the beta launch of LayerZero, the LayerZero Labs team recently launched Stargate, a cross-chain liquidity transfer protocol built on LayerZero’s generic messaging. Stargate solves a holy grail problem called the Bridging Trilemma and enables cross-chain liquidity transfer in native assets, with unified liquidity and instant guarantee of finality. The team believes Stargate will be integral to any application that wants to move cryptocurrency across blockchains.
In just 10 days post-launch, Stargate has surpassed $3.4 billion in assets secured, and Stargate has sent over $264 million in transfers over LayerZero. Building off this momentum, LayerZero Labs will focus on integrating the LayerZero protocol with Non-EVM blockchains (Solana, Terra, etc.) while building a community of cross-chain DeFi protocols and dApps powered by LayerZero & Stargate.
LayerZero Labs was co-founded in 2021 by Bryan Pellegrino (CEO), Ryan Zarick (CTO) and Caleb Banister (Principal Engineer).
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