Binance is has announced that Binance Labs, the venture capital and incubator of Binance, and Multicoin Capital co-led the $6M funding round for LayerZero, an omnichain interoperability protocol that unites decentralized applications across disparate blockchains.
Sino Global Capital, Defiance, Delphi Digital, Robot Ventures, Spartan, Hypersphere Ventures, Protocol Ventures, Gen Block Capital, Echelon Capital also participated in this round.
LayerZero is a new interoperability protocol that connects disparate blockchains. Interoperability hinges on passing messages between chains; current solutions achieve this with a middle-chain (hub-and-spoke model) such as Polkadot or running pairwise on-chain light nodes such as Cosmos IBC.
The former solution centralizes security around a single hub, allowing for cheap transactions at the cost of a single point of failure. The latter achieves high security with on-chain validation but is both capital and resource-intensive. LayerZero brings the best of both worlds together with a novel on-chain "Ultra Light Node," which achieves the security of a light node with the cost-effectiveness of middle chains.
“DeFi applications have spread out and deployed across multiple chains due to high fees and evolving investors preferences. This has led to severe fragmentation across the market. You can currently trade on Sushi using Ethereum, Moonbeam, Fantom, xDAI, and Binance Smart Chain, and more chains are coming. While all of these applications are Sushi, but none alone is Sushi. LayerZero solves this problem by uniting liquidity across chains and making it possible to transact in, out, and across disparate networks with ease,” said Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder, LayerZero.
LayerZero plans to support Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, Arbitrum and Optimism at launch. It will add support for more EVM chains and non-EVM chains, such as Solana, Polkadot, and Algorand, in the months following launch.
"Binance Labs invests in disruptive innovations that have incredible potential to shape the crypto landscape. We view the future crypto space as a multi-chain universe, with a strong demand for lightweight and secure interoperability solutions. That is the future we see in LayerZero and why we fully support the team," said Chase Guo, Investment Director at Binance Labs.
LayerZero achieves speed, security, and cost-efficiency by performing the same validation as an on-chain light node but instead of keeping all block headers sequentially, block headers are streamed on-demand by decentralized oracles. This is a fundamentally new interoperability model that improves security by coordinating validation between nodes and oracles. LayerZero currently leverages Chainlink and Band Protocol for oracles but was designed to be oracle agnostic.
LayerZero paves the way for the first omnichain applications, opening the door for lending, AMMs, governance and much more to become truly chain agnostic,” said Kyle Samani, Managing Partner, Multicoin Capital. "Dapp developers no longer have to write chain-specific code; instead, they can just use LayerZero to develop one interface that sends messages to all chains. Anything that wants to share or consolidate state across multiple chains—which is practically every application today—should be using LayerZero."
LayerZero will use the new funds to further the development of LayerZero endpoints across the ecosystem and drive the adoption of the protocol. The project is currently under audit and is expected to launch in early Q4 2021.
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