Allbridge Raises $2M to Expand Cross-Chain Token Bridge

Allbridge, a bridge for cross-chain transfers of digital assets, has announced a $2 million funding round led by Race Capital. The new funding will help double the Allbridge team in engineering and business roles over the coming months, as well as invest in platform scalability, Allbridge co-founder Andriy Velykyy told CoinDesk in an email.

“We’re also conducting extensive security audits to ensure user and asset safety as we continue to scale and connect more chains and protocols,” said Velykyy. “Our goal has always been to bridge the Web 3 ecosystems together and this funding will help us move even faster in achieving this mission.”

Network congestion and high transaction costs or gas fees on Ethereum have driven the growth of layer 2 blockchains and sidechains that operate parallel to the Ethereum mainnet. There are also a number of separate blockchains that can run smart contracts, including Solana and Avalanche.

Launched seven months ago, San Francisco-based Allbridge serves as a bridge for transferring assets between Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and non-EVM compatible blockchains. Supported chains include Solana, Avalanche, Fantom, Celo, Polygon, Ethereum, BSC and Terra.

There are currently $474.7 million in tokens locked in contracts on the Allbridge protocol, according to DeFiLama data.

Allbridge is working on APIs that would allow developers to build decentralized applications (dapps) on the protocol.

“Cross-chain swaps built on Allbridge are the easiest way to exchange any asset between any networks, enabling new functionality like cross-chain lending where users can leverage collateral on one chain in order to receive an asset on another chain,” said Velykyy in a press release.

“Allbridge has already bridged over $1.7 billion to the Solana ecosystem five months after launch, helping extend the advantages of Solana DeFi to holders of more tokens. Allbridge is one of the enabling infrastructure layers helping make this happen,” said Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana and Solana Labs.