LayerZero raises $135 million from Sequoia Capital, a16z and FTX Ventures

Interoperability protocol LayerZero raised $135 million in a Series A+ round led by Sequoia Capital, a16z and FTX Ventures.

The Canada-based company was valued at $1 billion, according to Forbes.

“We had conviction in a cross-chain future, but the technology to enable it was insufficient—until we met LayerZero,” Michelle Bailhe, a partner at Sequoia, told the publication.

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Coinbase Ventures, PayPal Ventures, Tiger Global and Uniswap Labs are among other investors in the round.

LayerZero recently launched Stargate, a cross-chain protocol allowing users to swap tokens across seven blockchains, including Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, BSC, Fantom, Arbitrum and Optimism. It plans to expand to Solana and Terra in the next few weeks, per the report.

The protocol announced earlier this month that it would auction off 10% of its stargate token supply, in an effort to generate liquidity.

The team behind Stargate said in a Medium post that the protocol managed to solve “the bridging trilemma,” meaning that it features unified liquidity pools between chains, instant guaranteed finality of transactions, and the use of native assets for cross-chain swaps.

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Catarina is a reporter for The Block based in New York City. Before joining the team, she covered local news at Patch.com and at the New York Daily News. She started her career in Lisbon, Portugal, where she worked for publications such as Público and Sábado. She graduated from NYU with a MA in Journalism. Feel free to email any comments or tips to [email protected] or to reach out on Twitter (@catarinalsm).