In the midst of a bear market, Matter Labs raised $200 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly.
Although investor confidence has been shaken by recent events in the crypto industry, with the collapse of FTX and Alameda Research, established projects continue to attract capital. This has been the case for blockchain innovation lab Matter Labs, creator of the zkSync protocol, which has managed to raise $200 million from major investors to boost the scaling of the Ethereum network.
Crypto industry investment firms Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly led Matter Labs’ recent Series C investment round. Other top firms participating in the round include Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), LightSpeed Venture Partners, and Variant.
On Twitter, the blockchain innovation lab highlighted that the $200 million raised in its Series C round is in addition to the funds it already had available for its goal of scaling to Ethereum.
Matter Labs, which now has $458 million dollars for this mission, will fund the development of its own projects, third-party projects, and the creation of its Matter University training and mentoring center, all with the goal of making zkSync the preferred scaling option for developers.
Of the funding Matter Labs has available to power Ethereum scalability with zkSync, $200 million comes from its dedicated ecosystem fund, $50 million from its Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and $8 million from its Series A funding round and seed round.
Matter Labs Commits to Open Source Development
As part of their roadmap, Matter Labs developers have announced that they have committed to open source software development as a way to engage the community and avoid censorship.
At present, Matter Labs is working on a new version of zkSync, called zkSync 2.0. Through this new version, where they have already been registered More than 150 projects from the crypto industryMatter Labs hopes to make it a reality for Ethereum to be able to process up to 200.000 transactions per second.
However, maintaining the open source philosophy is essential to the developers at Matter Labs, so they announced that this will be the first time they release a general-purpose ZK build package that is completely free and open, licensed under the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) license.
In addition, to ensure the security of its smart contracts, Matter Labs announced a strategic partnership with OpenZeppelin, which will be the firm in charge of auditing its code.
Matter Labs developers also mentioned on Twitter the possibility of launching their own token. In this regard, they indicated that in the event of any possible future token launch, two-thirds of these will be reserved for the development of their ecosystem, highlighting that the tokens will be subject to fair and transparent distribution.
zkSync: Boosting Ethereum Scalability
Matter Labs is known for the development of the zkSync protocol, which implements ZK-Rollup technology. The protocol zkSync was launched in 2020 as a powerful tool to increase scalability and performance of the Ethereum blockchain, using zero-knowledge (ZK) proof technology.
The innovation lab claims that ZK technology is the most viable to ensure widespread and global adoption of public blockchain networks like Ethereum, due to its ability to significantly increase the number of transactions per second (TPS) that the network can process, while significantly reducing its gas fees, making commissions very low and accessible.
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