Axelar, a decentralized interoperability fabric that connects blockchain ecosystems, applications and users, has announced seed funding of $3.75 million with investments secured from, Binance X, the Binance Smart Chain Accelerator Fund, an arm of Binance – the popular cryptocurrency exchange company; and DCVC (Data Collective), the San Francisco-based venture capital firm, which last year set up a $725m deep tech fund.
Other notable investors include Divergence Ventures, the crypto operator fund; Waikit Lau, Serial Entrepreneur & Investor and Naval Ravikant, Founder & CEO of AngelList. The funding will be used towards building the tech, tools, and API solutions of the network, along with recruiting the engineers that will help design the underlying technology and protocols.
Sergey Gorbunov, Co-founder & CEO of Axelar, said, “We are delighted to receive backing from such a high calibre group of investors. This support will be crucial to help us accelerate our roadmap and to scale cross-chain communication. Today, we are seeing more and more autonomous blockchain platforms emerge, with no unified approach for developers to communicate with the entire ecosystem. By launching Axelar, we’re allowing developers to build on the best platforms for their needs and leverage a simple protocol suite and API to access global cross-chain liquidity, users, and communication.”
Axelar protocol, developed by the founding team members of Algorand, and their team, is powered by a decentralized network and designed explicitly to frictionlessly connect all blockchain ecosystems that speak different languages. Axelar fabric connects stand alone blockchains, such as the Bitcoin Network and Ethereum, and cross-chain hubs, such as Cosmos or Polkadot, to enable developers to operate using a universal protocol and API. This will save dApp developers from rewriting their applications as new bridges are developed. Axelar is powered by a decentralized open network of validators that collectively run a byzantine consensus protocol, meaning that the system will continue to run even where some of the nodes may act maliciously or fail.
Commenting on the investment, Teck Chia, Head of Binance X, said, “We are impressed by Sergey and Georgios from the Axelar team for their strong background in cryptography and consensus. Interoperability is an important challenge for today’s blockchain ecosystem. We appreciate Axelar’s decentralized, secure, and uniform approaches to complete cross-chain communication. We look forward to supporting Axelar in enabling interoperability with the Binance Smart Chain.”
Calvin Liu, Partner at Divergence Ventures, said, “We believe a decentralized, generalized interoperability layer is inevitable in a multi-chain future. Axelar’s approach to solving cross-chain communication is a major advancement that will enable developers to write applications and use assets between multiple chains at once. The team is incredibly strong, experienced, and focused on innovation. We’re very proud to support them.”
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