LayerZero Labs Inc., a cross-chain interoperability protocol startup, today announced that it has raised $120 million in new funding at a valuation of $3 billion.

The new Series B round triples LayerZero’s valuation since its last funding round of $135 million in March 2022. The round was joined by 33 investors, including the crypto arm of Andreessen Horowitz, BOND, Circle Ventures, Samsung Next, Sequoia Capital, OKX Ventures and OpenSea Ventures. The auction house Christie’s also joined the round, which is known for selling high-valued pieces of crypto artwork.

LayerZero provides what’s called a “messaging protocol” that allows decentralized applications to interoperate among multiple blockchains. Its protocol platform is designed to allow trustless and configurable message delivery so that developers can rapidly create dapps that can run across different blockchains and still communicate.

By using LayerZero’s protocol, developers can build portions of their dapps to take advantage of the capabilities of various blockchains for certain parts of their apps. For example, a developer can use a highly scalable blockchain with low fees and high transaction rates for maintaining records of fast-paced gameplay in one part of their app and use a separate blockchain that runs more slowly with higher security for tracking betting or storing game items.

“Imagine a future where a single user-facing application can harness the speed of Solana, the security of Ethereum, and the cheap file storage of Arweave, while also being fully abstracted to the user,” said Ryan Zarick, co-founder and chief technology officer of LayerZero Labs. “The days of choosing one chain to build on are over; the future is omnichain applications.”

LayerZero’s protocol looks to address the problem where there are many blockchains in the crypto ecosystem, each of which tends to solve different problems but can’t communicate with each other. That has led to fragmentation, with developers choosing what blockchain they move to and locking themselves in.

There are currently other multichain interoperability projects currently being developed, but LayerZero has argued that they aren’t up to the task. Examples include Polkadot, which is a centralized solution using a hub-and-spoke model, and Cosmos IBC, which uses lightweight nodes. The former can lose security and the latter becomes expensive because of Ethereum transaction fees.

The company launched in September 2021 with $6 million in funding. Since then LayerZero’s protocol has relayed more than 2 million messages among more than 30 chains, secured $7 billion in total locked-in value, and processed $6 billion in transaction volume. According to the company, the platform has deployed more than 300,000 contracts on its testnet and 3,500 on its mainnet, with more than 10,000 unique applications and hundreds of thousands of unique users.

The company’s technology is in use by some of the crypto industry’s most well-known applications, including the largest decentralized crypto exchanges PancakeSwap, SushiSwap, TraderJoe and Uniswap.

Zarick likened the evolution of blockchain technology to the emergence of the internet, noting that computers also at first existed in fragmented and disconnected data centers without a distributed networking system to connect them. “LayerZero is revolutionizing blockchains by creating one unified ecosystem, like the internet, that connects each blockchain’s developers and user community,” he said.

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