Matter Labs, the company behind Ethereum Layer scaling protocol zkSync, has successfully raised fresh $50 million in a Series B funding round.
In a November 9 announcement, Matter Labs confirmed the successful completion of its Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
The finding initiative also saw participation from existing investors such as Placeholder and Dragonfly Capital.
The recent round follows an initial Series A funding that successfully secured $6 million in February this year. At the time, the funding initiative saw participation of many new investors, including Crypto.com, ConsenSys, and OKEx.
Matter Labs now intends to use the funds to develop the Ethereum Layer two rollups solution, focusing on facilitating low-cost payments.
By design, rollups are the second-layer scaling solution that “roll-up” transactions data in batches for more efficient processing on Ethereum’s layer-one. The new rollups solution uses zero-knowledge proofs to minimize the data held in these batches. As a result, the protocol reduces the computing and storage resources required to validate blocks.
In that context, the protocol will build on the current iteration by supporting Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible smart contracts.
While explaining zkSync v2 protocol functionality, Dan Boneh, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, said:
“zkSync will enable Ethereum transactions at a much higher rate and lower gas fees than mainnet. The math used by Matter Labs is really quite beautiful, and it is remarkable to see this coming to fruition at a massive scale so soon.”
In the meantime, the first version of zkSync v2 is currently live on testnet, with a port Uniswap v2 dubbed “UniSync” ready for an experiment. Up to date, the protocol has successfully processed more than 2 million transactions since it went live in June.
Matter Labs is an early proponent of the Ethereum Layer-two rollups, with the firm launching the first-ever public zk-rollup prototype in earlier 2019.
According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, layer-two solutions such as zkSync will solve the network’s existing scaling issues before the protocol is officially rolled out sometime in late 2022.
Earlier this year, Ethereum’s founder anticipated that zk-rollup would become the dominant scaling solution over “the medium to long term in all use cases.”
