Quick take:
- Union Labs will use the money to expand its team and accelerate the development of its cross-chain interoperability layer.
- Lightshift and Chorus One also joined the fundraising.
- Union Labs is building the first fully trustless bridge that connects appchains, layer-1, and layer-2 networks.
Union Labs has announced a $4 million seed round led by Galileo, Semantic Ventures, Tioga Capital, and Nascent. Lightshift and Chorus One also joined the round. The Web3 infrastructure startup is building a cross-chain interoperability layer that connects appchains, layer 1, and layer 2 networks.
According to the announcement, Union Labs will use the funds to accelerate the development of its fully trustless cross-chain bridge ahead of the mainnet launch and expand its team, which already boasts leaders from leading Web3 companies including Composable Finance, Consensys, Tokensoft, and Polygon.
Commenting on the announcement, Karel Kubat, Founder of Union Labs lauded the fundraising as a show of trust in Union Labs and its team and a strong “showing of support from the industry for projects focussed on sovereignty and decentralization.”
“The most prominent hacks are bridge hacks, yet bridges remain critical infrastructure for almost all projects, showing the need for better, more resilient products. It is our responsibility to innovate new ways to protect these assets and further the adoption of ZK technologies to realize a secure and interoperable, cross-chain future,” Kubat said.
The need for more secure bridging protocols has risen following huge crypto exploits in 2022, which saw $1.6 billion stolen in bridge hacks. Crypto companies are increasingly deploying self-custody services that leverage multi-party computation encryption as part of their security firewalls. Binance is the latest to launch its self-custody wallet that leverages MPC technology.
Union’s product is developed to be the first fully trustless cross-chain bridge to address the growing need for efficient and secure data transfer and interaction between various blockchains.
With cross-chain communications verified using zero-knowledge proofs, private keys are not a target for hackers, as they cannot take control of the protocol, the company wrote in a statement on Thursday.
David Feiock, Founder at Galileo, commented: “Secure, reliable, cost-efficient communication between networks and dApps, facilitated by ZK infrastructure, ultimately means more use cases and more users. The advent of Union represents a watershed moment for the entire crypto industry: trust-minimized interoperability between Ethereum and IBC-connected blockchains.”
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