ZetaChain Raises $27M for Interoperable Blockchain Platform

Network layer 1 ZetaChain has raised $27 million to support its chain-agnostic platform, per an August 16 announcement.

Blockchain.com, Human Capital, Vy Capital, Sky9 Capital, Jane Street Capital, VistaLabs, CMT Digital, Foundation Capital, Lingfeng Capital, GSR, Kudasai, and Krust are among the investors participating in this round.

The 2021 protocol is intended to standardize network interoperability, allowing non-smart contract systems to interact with the larger decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.

Developers can therefore implement smart contracts on networks that do not support the technology, such as Bitcoin and Dogecoin.

A smart contract is a contract that is digitally stored on a blockchain and autonomously executed when certain conditions are met.

In the crypto ecosystem, however, the inability of smart contracts to communicate across blockchains has been a major weakness.

ZetaChain intends to address this issue by enabling developers to construct omnichain decentralized applications (DApps), in which all assets and data can be accessed from a single platform regardless of the blockchain on which they were created or stored and without the need for bridging or wrapping tokens.

According to ZetaChain, more than 27,000 DApp contracts have been deployed on the ZetaChain platform by a variety of third-party applications, including cross-chain DeFI, nonfungible tokens, Web3 identity, and gaming protocols.

The protocol claims that over 13 million transactions have been conducted on its testnet by over 1.7 million participants.

Ankur Nandwani (ex-Coinbase, Brave, and 0x), Panruo Wu (early contributor to THORchain), and Brandon Truong (ex-BuzzFeed, Udacity, and Yada) are just a few of the prominent crypto contributors who have joined the platform since its launch.

Several former employees of Cosmos, Ignite, ConsenSys, and other blockchain initiatives are also core members.

“Our EVM-compatible cross-chain smart contracts enable decentralized app developers to create services that are faster, more secure, and easier to use,” Nandwani said in a statement.