‘The future is multichain’ has become crypto’s latest favourite refrain.
Forbes reports that contrary to the mantra of ‘one chain to rule them all’, many enthusiasts are now starting to believe that the blockchain industry will consist of many different blockchain networks communicating with each other in much the same way that Android users can now make FaceTime calls.
However, until recently this was not possible since there were moats between many of the leading blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and others, forcing users to essentially pick a team. “Those decisions should not have to be made,” said Ramnik Arora, head of product at FTX and an investor at FTX Ventures.
To that end, writes Forbes, along with investors from Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, FTX Ventures co-led a $135 million Series A+ investment in LayerZero Labs, which is developing a protocol that aims to connect decentralized applications across multiple blockchains.
“Our mission is to connect every [smart] contract on every chain,” saidBryan Pellegrino, LayerZero Labs’ CEO and cofounder.
Revealed exclusively to Forbes, the round values the year-old Vancouver, Canada-based firm at $1 billion. Other investors include Coinbase Ventures, PayPal Ventures, Tiger Global, and Uniswap Labs. The company had previously raised $2 million in seed funding and $6 million in Series A financing from Binance Labs, Multicoin Capital, and Sino Global Capital, among others.
Most cross-chain communication today takes place on the so-called bridges, which solve interoperability by locking assets from one chain and issuing an equal value of tokens on another. According to DeFi Llama, some $33 billion worth of cryptocurrency is currently locked in bridge protocols.
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