Binance Labs Makes a Strategic Investment in Ankr

Main takeaways: 

• Binance Labs’ strategic investment will help Ankr further improve the scalability of blockchain networks.

• Launched in 2017, Ankr provides builders with streamlined access to a global network of nodes running on 18 different blockchains.

Binance Labs, the venture capital arm and accelerator of Binance, has made a strategic investment in Web3 infrastructure provider Ankr. The funds will go toward ramping up the work on Ankr’s remote procedure call (RPC) service and building out its Web3 developer suite.

Ankr has previously made open-source contributions to the BNB Chain and BNB Liquid Staking. It helped build out BNB Chain’s core infrastructure. Additionally, Ankr further improved the BNB ecosystem by implementing the Erigon and Archive Node upgrades, as well as the latest BNB Application Sidechain (BAS) scalability solution. The Erigon upgrade reduced BNB Chain’s storage requirements by 75%, increased RPC performance tenfold, and made the synchronization process 100 times faster.

Ankr also supports the BNB Chain ecosystem by bringing DeFi composability to BNB Liquid Staking. BNB token holders can engage in staking, farming, and contributing to vaults all at once. They can also mint new liquid staking tokens, which can be used to earn layers of rewards on both BNB Chain and Ethereum-based decentralized exchanges (DEXs). 

Ryan Fang, co-founder of Ankr, said: "We are very excited to have Binance Labs as a strategic investor. BNB Chain is the chain with the highest amount of daily transactions and active users by far. We are committed to helping BNB Chain further scale, enhancing the BNB token utility, and expanding the Binance Application Sidechain (BAS) ecosystem. We aim to support not only innovative use cases that require a highly scalable infrastructure, but also infrastructure services that could contribute to building permissioned sidechains." 

Ankr’s developer suite includes the Multi-Chain Liquid Staking software development kit (SDK), Web3 Gaming SDK, and App Chains-as-a-Service. An underlying utility service that powers Web3 projects and DApps, the Ankr protocol currently serves an average of 250 billion RPC requests per month across 50 blockchain networks.