Binance venture capital arm leads $60M round in cross-chain protocol Multichain
The venture capital and incubation wing of Binance cryptocurrency exchange, Binance Labs, has recently led a financing round for the cross-chain protocol Multichain (previously known as Anyswap).
Shortly after it was rebranded from Anyswap in the last week, Multichain has reported having raised $60 million in a seed funding round by Binance Labs; the firm officially made an announcement on December 21.
Other participants in the raise were major industry investors and VC firms such as IDG Capital, Sequoia China, Primitive Ventures, Three Arrows Capital, DeFiance Capital, Hypersphere Ventures, Circle Ventures, Magic Ventures andHashKey.
Apart from allocating for capital investment for Multichain, Binance is reportedly working on building a stronger relationship with the cross-chain protocol.
On December 20, Multichain had announced that it is now being officially recommended as a tool for bridging Token across chains through the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
BSC has said that the Multichain is “one of the biggest routers on BSC,” that is providing a non-custodial as well as multi-party computation model for guaranteeing the security of on-chain assets.
Established in July 2020, Anyswap had originally been positioned as a cross-chain decentralized exchange. The platform then evolved into Multichain, a cross-chain router protocol (CRP) that was providing a mature real-time CRP system to enable interoperability on multiple networks, including Ethereum, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, Moonriver and several others.
According to the latest announcement, the total value that is locked on Multichain now amounts to over $5 billion, with the number of users being over 300,000.
Co-founder of Multichain, Zhaojun, has said that the protocol is responsible for connecting “public blockchains and crypto assets” more than anyone else, having “lower transaction fees, shorter bridging time and higher security levels.”
The firm has informed that the funds that have been raised in the seed round would be utilized in the growth of the team and ecosystem, including research and development teams focusing on crypto algorithms, audits and security.
Founded in September 2020, BSC is a decentralized finance solution that brings programmability and interoperability to the Binance Chain, with reliance on a system of 21 validators with Proof of Staked Authority consensus.
BSC has grown increasingly popular in 2021, as the network hits a historical high of over 16 million daily transactions on November 25.
