Matter Labs raises $200 million for Ethereum ZK rollups
With the completion of the Ethereum merger, the focus has shifted to scaling the network through Layer 2 solutions such as zero-knowledge rollups.
ZK rollups in particular are an important part the Ethereum roadmap, which is repeatedly mentioned by the likes of Vitalik Buterin and blockchain developers. They aggregate transactions and execute them off-chain to improve network speeds and lower fees. Currently, Ethereum is processing about 30 transactions per second, but in the future with rollups, the goal is 100,000 transactions per second, Buterin said.
In the race to produce the highest quality Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible ZK Rollups, there are many competitors, from Polygon to Matter Labs, and many venture capital firms interested.
Today, Matter Labs announced a $200 million Series C round co-led by Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly. Other investors include LightSpeed Venture Partners, Variant and Andreessen Horowitz, the company said wealthand adds that Matter Labs has raised a total of $458 million with the new round.
The majority of the funding will go towards “building the team, growing, scaling and being ready to mature as a company,” said Steve Newcomb, chief product officer at Matter Labs. “When I started we had 40 people. We’re 90 people now and we’ll soon have hundreds, so most of the money goes to the people.”
Although Matter Labs released its zkSync 2.0 product on October 28, the company will now allow its technology to be available through an MIT open source license at Fair Onboarding Alpha. This will allow developers to view, modify and fork the code, and it is notable that skeptics in the industry questioned the viability of Matter Labs’ zkSync 2.0 viability, citing mainly the open source issue.
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