Omnichain developer LayerZero Labs raises $135M

The protocol, which is still in development, intends to connect dApps across chains using on-chain nodes.

On Wednesday, LayerZero Labs, a firm that develops protocol to enable omnichain decentralized applications, or dApps, to span multiple blockchains, announced that it raised $135 million in its latest funding round. The deal values LayerZero Labs at $1 billion and will accelerate the development of its namesake protocol.

The round was led by notable venture groups and investors such as Sequoia Capital, FTX Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and with participation from Coinbase Ventures, PayPal Ventures, Tiger Global, Uniswap Labs, and more.

It aims to unite applications such as gaming, nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, marketplaces, media apps, etc., so they are operable across multi-chain realms. Potential new use cases via LayerZero include: decentralized finance applications utilizing trading, borrowing, and lending across multiple blockchains; games and media dApps having high-throughput transactions relocated to one blockchain while buying and selling NFTs onto other blockchains with the most liquid markets.

Following the beta launch of LayerZero, the firm recently launched Stargate, a cross-chain liquidity transfer protocol. In just 10 days post-launch, LayerZero says that Stargate has surpassed $3.4 billion in assets secured, with over $264 million in transfers over LayerZero. The developers’ next steps involve integrating the LayerZero protocol with non-Ethereum Virtual Machine blockchains such as 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.”

Meanwhile, Ramnik Arora, an investor at FTX Ventures, added:

“LayerZero allows smart contracts on one chain to seamlessly and securely leverage the network of another chain, increasing the value of the entire blockchain ecosystem. The team is a rare combination of vision and technical execution.”