Layer 2 Developer Matter Labs Closes $50M Series B
- Led by a16z, the Series B will help the company expand its team, marketing efforts, and finance its business growth.
- Matter Labs is currently working on its zkSync v2 technology, which will support EVM-compatible smart contracts.
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The project behind Ethereum’s Layer 2 technology zkSync, Matter Labs, has closed a $50 million Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the firm said in a blog post on 8 November.
According to the announcement, the new funding round saw participation from major crypto companies such as Blockchain.com, Crypto.com, Consensys, ByBit, OKEx, Alchemy, Covalent, as well as more than 80 angel investors. Existing backers Placeholder, Dragonfly, and 1kx — who joined the company’s $6 million Series A in February — also joined the Series B. Ali Yahya, general partner at a16z, said in a statement:
“Matter Labs is extending the frontier of what is possible in web3 by solving the problem of blockchain scalability without sacrificing security, decentralization, or composability. By helping Ethereum scale, Matter Labs will unlock a whole new set of possible applications in web3. We’re thrilled to be partnering with them on that mission.”
The newly acquired funds will not only go towards further developing Matter Labs’ zkSync v2 — which is currently live on testnet with a port of Uniswap v2 for experimentation — but will help the company expand its team and finance its business growth. The COO of the company, Zoe Gadsden, said Matter Labs will also focus on marketing efforts and building its community so as to attract new users and developers.
The company’s zkSync technology is a Layer 2 rollup solution that focuses on facilitating low-cost payments on the Ethereum blockchain. Matter Labs ZK-rollups uses zero-knowledge proofs to minimize the computing and storage needed to validate blocks by consolidating transactions data in batches for more efficient processing on Ethereum. The new zkSync v2 will build on the current version by supporting Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible smart contracts. Dan Boneh, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, said in a statement:
“zkSync will enable Ethereum transactions at a much higher rate and lower gas fees than mainnet. The math used by Matter Labs is really quite beautiful, and it is remarkable to see this coming to fruition at a massive scale so soon.”
- Coinbase’s Base blockchain was made available to the public on Wednesday, featuring over 100 dApps and services as part of its ecosystem.
- In order to show its capabilities and promote its mainnet partners, Base has also launched an event called “Onchain Summer” that will allow users to mint exclusive NFTs on the network.
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- The bankrupt crypto lender has agreed on a settlement with its Series B holders on how to distribute the $25 million from the sale of self-custody platform GK8.
- The majority of funds, $24 million, will be allocated for legal expenses, while the remaining $1 million will be distributed between the Series B holders.
- Coinbase’s protocol security team and over 100 external security researchers were involved with testing the upcoming layer 2 Base blockchain over the past six months.
- The project said it has now completed four out of five criteria for Base’s mainnet launch, with the remaining one being to demonstrate “testnet stability”.