Ethereum Layer 2 developer Matter Labs raises $50 million 

Venture Capital • November 8, 2021, 2:30PM EST
the block

Matter Labs, the project behind the Ethereum Layer 2 technology zkSync, has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

Other investors in the round included Blockchain.com, Crypto.com, Consensys, ByBit, OKEx, Alchemy, Covalent, and many angel investors. Existing backers Placeholder, Dragonfly, and 1kx also participated in the Series B round, who joined its $6 million Series A funding round in February.

With fresh capital at hand, Matter Labs plans to expand its team and finance its business growth. COO Zoé Gadsden said that until recently, Matter Labs has been more focused on technological developments. "Now it's time to put a similarly concerted effort into reaching users and developers, which will require scaling our business development and marketing efforts and building out our community and ecosystem," said Gadsden.

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Matter Labs' technology uses ZK-rollups (based on zero-knowledge proof method). ZK-rollups are one of the two popular Ethereum scaling techniques; the other one is optimistic rollups. The key difference between the two techniques is that a transaction can be challenged with optimistic rollups, whereas with ZK-rollups transactions are valid by design.

Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin has said that ZK-rollups "will win out in all use cases" in the medium to long term because of their application-specific and other use cases.

Matter Labs' zkSync technology is currently live as version 1 and it supports ether (ETH) transfers on the mainnet. Version 2 of zkSync, which is still under development, will also support EVM-compatible smart contracts.

"Our long-term goal is to make self-sovereign participation in the digital economy — that is, maintaining true control over one's digital assets — affordable for anyone in the world," said Matter Labs co-founder and CEO Alex Gluchowski.

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