LayerZero Labs Nets $135M for Omnichain Developments

LayerZero Labs has raised $135 million in a funding round co-led by Sequoia Capital, FTX Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, according to a Wednesday (March 30) press release.

Coinbase Ventures, PayPal Ventures, Tiger Global, Uniswap Labs and other investors also participated in the round. The funding will go towards new omnichain developments as LayerZero also accelerates the development of cross-chain decentralized applications (dApps).

“This round is a massive step forward for LayerZero Labs and the unfolding interoperability landscape,” said Bryan Pellegrino, CEO and co-founder of LayerZero Labs. “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.”

The crypto ecosystem has been evolving as of late, with demand increasing for high throughput apps. Per the release, those apps can include media apps, non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces and even games, built on “cost-effective” blockchains.

However, as the infrastructure has been in short supply, users, data and liquidity have often been fragmented across various apps on different chains. According to the release, LayerZero solves this through providing an omnichain interoperability protocol, reportedly uniting dApps across various chains.

LayerZero also reportedly lets users interact with the dApps on multiple blockchains, which Ryan Zarick, chief technology officer and co-founder of the company, said will “seamlessly communicate” without the user even realizing it.

With the new funding, LayerZero is now valued at $1 billion.

PYMNTS recently wrote that there’s an international group of securities regulators looking at pushing a coordinated global response to decentralized finance (DeFi), which has seen more risks as of late.

Read more: DeFi’s Risks ‘Quickly Evolving’ to Threaten Traditional Markets, Securities Regulators Warn

A report by the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) revealed the new task force, which will work to “take timely and coordinated policy action to appropriately address the risks arising from this fast-growing area.”

The IOSCO report noted there are benefits to things like novel finance products. The IOSCO also found that many DeFi products “mirror” those from regular finance markets, but with less regulation and more risks.