Polymer Labs, an infrastructure provider focused on IBC protocols, announced that it has secured $3.6M funding in Seed Round co-led by Distributed Global and North Island Ventures.
Other investors, including Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, Tendermint, Advanced Blockchain AG, The LAO, Taureon, Wintermute Trading, Longhash Ventures, Signum, UOB Venture Management, and angels including Joe Lallouz (Bison Trails), Karim Atiyeh (Ramp), Martin Mao (Chronosphere), Sam Kazemian (Frax), Andrew Masanto (Reserve), Loong Wang (REN), and 30+ others, participated.
How will the funding be used?
The company is planning to use the funding to recruit Web2 and Web3 talent to work on scaling IBC to all chains and build secure IBC infrastructure in the form of the Polymer Chain.
“Polymer Labs’ universal IBC routing/rollup solution is at the bleeding edge of the fabric of Web3. We’re excited to support Polymer’s blockchain interoperability solutions and co-lead its seed round. We’re looking forward to continuing to work closely with Peter, Bo, Alexander, and the larger Polymer team in establishing the Multichain standard and decentralizing the future of Web3 infrastructure,” says Johnny Steindorff of Distributed Global
Building IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication)
Polymer believes that IBC is the OSS standard for how cross-chain communication should work.
Polymer Labs is building a secure IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) Infrastructure, a standard primarily developed for the Cosmos ecosystem to enable different blockchains to communicate easily with each other.
The company’s IBC based multi-cluster networking protocol (Polymer) will provide e2e IBC connectivity across ecosystems.
The infrastructure will be governed by the first IBC infrastructure-focused DAO — PolymerDAO.
“We spent a lot of time surveying the ecosystem and the different interoperability projects and different solutions,” co-founder Peter Kim told CoinDesk in an interview. “What we’ve found is that Cosmos’s documentation, and the IBC specification that Tendermint [now Ignite] built so far, have been some of the most robust that we’ve seen.”
The company is planning to make blockchains like Solana and Ethereum more easily compatible with chains built using Cosmos’ Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol.
“Web3 is rapidly evolving into a network-of-networks, and interoperability solutions like Polymerase will function as some of the most important blockchain infrastructures in the coming years. We’re thrilled to support this project,” says Travis Scher of North Island Ventures
“Tendermint is excited to support Polymer Labs as they build out what we consider to be the IBC Adapter to the greater ecosystem external to Cosmos. As they scale IBC to all chains, Polymer Labs aims to position Polymer as the universal IBC router to all chains,” says Alessio Treglia, VP of Engineering at Tendermint
“We are excited to back Polymer as it tackles DeFi’s biggest growth opportunity in cross-chain interoperability. Purpose-built blockchains are key to advancing specific use cases and are healthy for the ecosystem overall, but, if they don’t interact with one another, users will find them cumbersome to navigate. Interoperability solutions like Polymerase will allow users and value to move freely across chains, paving the way for an ecosystem that is both highly decentralized and easily accessible — with users and developers able to pick their favorite features across chains. The multichain Polymer DAO is an exciting step in the development of multichain native dapps,” says Matt Beck, Digital Currency Group.
