Wormhole, the company behind a cross-blockchain messaging protocol, today announced it secured a gigantic $225 million investment at a valuation of $2.5 billion, making it the largest funding cryptocurrency-related funding round of 2023.

According to the announcement, the fundraise was joined by was joined by Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, ParaFi, Dialectic, Borderless Capital, Arrington Capital, and Jump Trading.

The company’s technology is used to bridge assets between different blockchains, such as allowing users to move nonfungible tokens between different chains. A nonfungible token is a virtual representation that certifies the ownership of a virtual item, such as a piece of art, digital content or other media. Using Wormhole, a user could move that asset from one blockchain to another, such as Ethereum to Polygon.

In addition to the fundraise, the team behind Wormhole also announced the formation of Wormhole Labs, a new independent company that will grow the development of the products, tools and reference implementations of the cross-chain protocol.

Wormhole claims that since its launch it has facilitated the transfer of more than $35 billion in value and regularly processes more than 2 million in cross-chain messages across more than 30 chains every day.

Wormhole was incubated by developers within Jump Crypto, the crypto division of the high-frequency trading firm Jump Trading, which joined the investment round. The launch of Wormhole Labs finalizes the company’s split from Jump, which first Bloomberg reported on earlier this month.

“Nearly three years ago, Wormhole was launched with the vision of a world resembling the one we see today,” said Saeed Badreg, co-founder and chief executive of Wormhole Labs. “Where the relentless expansion of blockchains is not a niche transient trend but an enduring transformation. Where Fortune 100 companies onboard both public and private blockchains. We reaffirmed our commitment to this vision by launching Wormhole Labs, dedicated to advancing the technology that makes efficient blockchain-to-blockchain communication possible.”

As a company, Wormhole has seen a bit of a checkered history. About a year after the company’s launch in February 2021, Wormhole’s protocol was exploited for more than $321 million in its Ethereum-Solana bridge. This was one of the largest hacks of 2022 and led Jump Crypto to cover more than $320 million in funds lost during the hack.

Later that year in May 2022, the Terraform Labs Pte TerraUSD stablecoin lost its parity with the U.S. dollar, which led to the token losing its value and ultimately caused a catastrophic crash across cryptocurrency markets. That same month, investors in Terra sued Jump Trading and the company’s Chief Executive Kanav Kariya alleging the firm manipulated the token for roughly $1.3 billion in profit, thereby creating the conditions that caused the crash.

Image: Nepool