In this new fresh investment round, LayerZero reunited 33 different backers with some reputable investors, including a16z Crypto, Sequoia Capital, Circle Ventures, Samsung Next, OpenSea, and Christie’s. Almost a year ago, LayerZero raised $135 million in an investment round co-led by Sequoia Capital, FTX Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz, including Coinbase Ventures and PayPal Ventures, Tiger Global, Uniswap Labs, and other investors. The previous investment round had put LayerZero at a valuation of $1 billion, three times smaller than the one announced today. According to Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs, the difficult mid-year market conditions were why LayerZero started soliciting money for the round late last year. Still, he enforced that LayerZero didn’t need the money and that the money that was raised to support LayerZero’s expansion goals. Pellegrino also mentioned that one of the major objectives for this year is to make considerable inroads into the Asia-Pacific market and the gaming industry. With the two funding rounds, LayerZero Labs has received $263 million. According to what a source told The Block, all its funding rounds have the same SAFE (short for “simple agreement for future equity”) structure plus token warrants.
What is LayerZero?
LayerZero is an efficient, trustless omnichain interoperability technology that enables dApps to develop and communicate across various blockchains. Using on-chain Ultra Light Nodes, which combine a middle chain's cost-effectiveness with a light node's security, LayerZero links dApps across chains. Developers can use the protocol to convert their decentralised applications (dApps) into omnichain applications using a single, straightforward interface.
Source: LayerZero Labs
The protocol also serves as an alternative to blockchain bridges, which require numerous transactions before a token transfer is complete. According to Pellegrino, the protocol’s total value locked has surpassed $7 billion, and transaction volume has reached over $6 billion since its inception last year. Pellegrino also explained that for blockchains, LayerZero is what the internet was for computing clusters. As chains can communicate and execute arbitrary data using LayerZero, much like a packet on the internet, in addition to creating bridges (to move assets or value between them). As a result, developers can now create apps that are more sophisticated than those that already exist and can do this while utilising chains seamlessly. LayerZero has also had widespread adoption, the most popular DeFi protocols, such as Uniswap, SushiSwap, and PancakeSwap, have Layerzero integrated for cross-chain transactions, and NFT transfers are also supported by LayerZero thanks to its Omnichain Non-Fungible Tokens (ONFT) protocol.
