LayerZero Raises $135M From Andreessen, FTX, Sequoia to Build Out 'Omnichain' Protocol

You've heard that it's a multichain future. How about an omnichain one?

LayerZero Labs, the developers behind the eponymous interoperability protocol, today announced a $135 million raise in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, FTX Ventures, and Sequoia Capital.

Among the other names contributing funds were Coinbase Ventures, PayPal Ventures, Tiger Global and Uniswap Labs. The raise, which sees the company valued at $1 billion, follows a $6 million Series A round in September 2021 and a $2 million seed round in April of last year.

LayerZero's basic pitch is that increased use of decentralized apps–play-to-earn games, lending and saving protocols, token exchanges, and NFT markets, to name a few—have left "data and liquidity fragmented across applications deployed on different chains." It says it's built an "omnichain interoperability protocol that unites" those applications and that the funding will help "accelerate the development" of applications using the protocol.

Other projects, such as Polkadot and Cosmos, are also working on so-called "layer 0" solutions to help scale blockchain networks.

Imagine buying an asset off of an Ethereum-based game, then porting it to a Solana-based NFT marketplace to sell, then putting the proceeds to work on an Avalanche-based lending platform. Pretty cool. But the LayerZero approach takes it a step further—it aims to have each individual app be able to utilize multiple chains so that they can function more efficiently.

Just as decentralized finance (DeFi) is often discussed in terms of composability—the "money Legos" that allow people to endlessly combine protocols into something new—LayerZero offers composability across chains.

"DeFi will have trading, borrowing, and lending applications across multiple blockchains, creating more efficient markets," states the press release. "Games and media dApps will have their high-throughput transactions on one blockchain, while having the ability to transfer, buy and sell NFTs onto other blockchains with the most liquid markets."

Said Andreessen Horowitz general partner Ali Yahya: “By unlocking cross-chain composability, LayerZero is enabling developers to build decentralized applications that simply weren't possible before.”

$135 million should help.