Quick take:
- Matter Labs has closed a $200 million Series C round co-led by Dragonfly and Blockchain Capital.
- The company said it will use the funds to accelerate the zkSync mission.
- A16z, Lightspeed Capital and Variant also participated in the round.
Matter Labs the web3 startup behind the zkSync project has completed a $200 million funding round co-led by Dragonfly and Blockchain Capital. The Series C round also attracted participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Lightspeed Capital and Variant.
ZkSync is a blockchain scaling solution that leverages zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups to enable infinite scalability. Its mission is to accelerate the onboarding process of mainstream businesses onto web3.
Web3 is a next-gen internet that leverages blockchain technology to enable the creation of user-centric projects that prioritise trustless communications and community ownership.
ZkSync describes itself as the end game for Ethereum scaling. The protocol has been in development for four years and is now available on the Ethereum mainnet. ZkSync provides scalability without compromising the security of decentralisation.
ZK rollups are layer 2 blockchain protocols that perform computations and process transactions off-chain while keeping assets in on-chain smart contracts.
Matter Labs’ latest fundraise brings the total raised for the zkSync mission to $458 million, comprised of a separate $200 million dedicated ecosystem fund, $50 million Series B led by a16z, and $8 million in Series A and Seed Round.
To ramp up the zkSync project, Matter Labs is expanding its team and launching built-in projects on zkSync. The funds will also be used to finance third-party ecosystem projects built by other teams, as well as, develop an education and tutorial centre.
Matter Labs plans to keep zkSync 2.0 opensource, giving anyone in the community the freedom to view, edit, and fork the code.
“We believe open-sourcing our technology will supercharge the adoption of our ZK-rollup and cement its core innovation — the zero-knowledge prover — as the gold standard for the ecosystem. This will be the first time a general-purpose ZK-rollup has been fully open-sourced,” Matter Labs wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
The company’s huge fundraising comes at a time when the crypto market is facing one of its biggest tests to date following the collapse of FTX.
Matter Labs also announced a partnership with smart contract auditing firm OpenZeppelin. The firm will spearhead the audit process of zkSync’s code ahead of the onboarding and launch. ZkSync 2.0 has already registered over 50 ecosystem projects including Chainlink, SushiSwap, Uniswap, Aave, Argent, 1inch, Gnosis, and Curve, among others.
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