With a $35 million raise, Axelar Network hopes to improve interoperability

 

With a $35 million raise, Axelar Network hopes to improve interoperability

Dragonfly Capital and Polychain Capital, among others, have invested in Axel.

With a $35 million raise, Axelar Network hopes to improve interoperability

Important Points to Remember

• Axel Network's Series B fundraising round brought approximately $35 million.

• Axel is a decentralized protocol to connect blockchain ecosystems.

• In late January, the Axelar team launched their phased manner.

Axel Network, a blockchain interoperability network, has finished its Series B fundraising round, receiving $35 million at a valuation of $1 billion.

Axel receives a $35 million investment.

During its Series B fundraising round, Axelar Network raised $35 million.

Dragonfly Capital, Polychain Capital, North Island Ventures, Rockaway Blockchain Fund, Cygni Capital, Lemniscap, Olive Tree Capital, Block change Ventures, and Node Capital was among the investors who contributed to the capital raising.

The Axel Network is a decentralized protocol that aims to connect blockchain ecosystems by providing cross-chain developer tools and APIs.

The team claimed in a news statement on Tuesday that the newly raised funds will be used to fund the Axelar network's growth and development as it attempts to construct an interoperability network for Layer 1 blockchains. Sergey Gorbunov, CEO, and co-founder of Axelar commented on the Series B fundraising round:

With the current amount of investment, "we'll be able to continue to build Axelar and its network while laying the groundwork for Web3," says the company.

Axel's fundraising announcement comes ahead of the planned release of its software development kit (SDK), which would allow developers to create cross-chain dApps on the network. According to Olaf Carlson-Wee, founder and CEO of Polychain Capital and an investor in the project, Axelar is "uniquely positioned to integrate blockchains with decentralized apps."

Late in January, the Axelar team launched their phased manner. Terra's first decentralized application, Satellite, allows users to move assets between Terra and a variety of other blockchains, including Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, Fantom, and Moonbeam.

Satellite allows assets to be transferred across chains using smart contracts that are validated by a decentralized group of validators. Other interoperability protocols that will compete with Axelar include Connext, Celer, AnySwap, Wormhole, Allbridge, and Hop Network. Axel has been able to raise funds at a time when blockchain pioneers such as Vitalik Buterin have criticized cross-chain asset transfer methods for their security flaws.

Hackers have seized hundreds of millions of dollars in customer cash through cross-chain bridges in the past. For example, in August 2021, a $611 million interoperability protocol named Poly Network was compromised before the hacker opted to refund the cash. In February, an anonymous hacker made $322 million by exploiting the multi-chain bridge Wormhole.

The author of this article owned ETH and MATIC at the time of publication.