LayerZero Labs raises $135M in funding at $1B valuation, reaching unicorn status

LayerZero, a startup developing protocol to enable omnichain decentralized applications (DApps) to span multiple blockchains, announced that it raised $135 million in its latest financing round.

The funding round valued the blockchain firm at $1 billion and will accelerate the development of its namesake protocol. The latest round was led by notable venture capital groups and investors like Andreessen Horowitz, FTX Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and with participation from Uniswap Labs, Tiger Global, PayPal Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and others.

LayerZero Labs aims to unite applications like non-fungible tokens (NFTs), gaming, marketplaces, media apps, and others, so they are operable across multichain realms. Potential novel use cases via LayeZero include decentralized fiancé (DeFi) applications utilizing borrowing, trading, and lending across multiple blockchains, media DApps, and games that have high-throughput transactions relocated to a single blockchain while buying and selling NFTs onto other blockchains within the most liquid markets.

After the beta launch of LayerZero, the firm recently released Stargate, a cross-chain liquidity transfer protocol. In 10 days post-launch, LayerZero reported that Stargate had surpassed $3.4 billion in assets secured, with more than $264 million in transfers via LayerZero. The developers’ next move involves integrating the LayerZero protocol with non-Ethereum Virtual Machine blockchains like Terra and Solana.