Investors Double Down On A Multichain Future

Investors have bought into LayerZero Labs’ vision of an internet of interoperable blockchains, valuing the company at $3B in a Series B funding round announced Tuesday.

LayerZero Labs raised $120M from 33 investors, including a16z crypto, Sequoia Capital, OKX Ventures, Circle Ventures, Samsung Next and OpenSea Ventures. The company has raised almost $300M in total, according to CrunchBase, and the money will be used to hire new employees and expand in Asia, according to a news release.

The LayerZero protocol allows for messaging between blockchains. Decentralized exchange SushiSwap uses the protocol to facilitate trades across blockchains. A cross-chain yield aggregator called Unison is in development. And an NFT project called Gh0stly Gh0sts bills itself as the “first omnichain NFT.”

Within a year of its launch, the protocol has processed more than $6B in transactions, according to the company.

But LayerZero’s model isn’t without controversy.

Research from L2BEAT, a website which focuses on Ethereum rollups and bridges, suggested that applications deployed on LayerZero could be reconfigured to steal users’ assets. The risky configuration occurs when two components, called the Oracle and the Relayer, are controlled by the same party.

Just as the internet once connected computers, LayerZero’s technology will connect blockchains, co-founder and CTO Ryan Zarick said in a prepared statement.

“Imagine a future where a single user-facing application can harness the speed of Solana, the security of Ethereum, and the cheap file storage of Arweave, while also being fully abstracted to the user, ” he said. “The days of choosing one chain to build on are over; the future is omnichain applications.”