An ambitious new protocol for uniting pools of liquidity across different blockchains has emerged from stealth mode to announce it will be launching as soon as three ongoing audits were complete.

Vancouver-based LayerZero Labs said the project was expected to launch “in early Q4 2021.”

An administrator in the project’s Discord channel was telling users that a “rough estimate” was that the launch of six weeks away, but it depended on the speed of the audits.

The project also announced they’d raised US$6.3 million in a Series funding round co-led by  Binance Labs and Multicoin Capital with participation from Sino Global Capital, Defiance, Delphi Digital, Robot Ventures, Spartan, Hypersphere Ventures, Protocol Ventures, Gen Block Capital.

The new funds will be used to further the development of LayerZero endpoints across the ecosystem and drive the adoption of the protocol, the company said. LayerZero previously raised US$2 million in seed funding

The protocol aims to connect disparate blockchains in a different method than the hub-and-spoke model used by Polkadot and Kusama and the on-chain light nodes used by the Cosmos inter-blockchain communication network.

Instead, LayerZero aims to combine those methods with what it calls ultra-light nodes using decentralised oracles.

“DeFi applications have spread out and deployed across multiple chains due to high fees and evolving investors preferences,” said LayerZero co-founder Bryan Pellegrino.

“This has led to severe fragmentation across the market. You can currently trade on Sushi using Ethereum, Moonbeam, Fantom, xDAI, and Binance Smart Chain, and more chains are coming.

“While all of these applications are Sushi, but none alone is Sushi. LayerZero solves this problem by uniting liquidity across chains and making it possible to transact in, out, and across disparate networks with ease.”

LayerZero says that by using on-chain decentralised oracles it is able to achieve speed, security, and cost-efficiency.

“LayerZero paves the way for the first omnichain applications, opening the door for lending, AMMs, governance and much more to become truly chain agnostic,” said Kyle Samani, managing partner of Multicoin Capital.

“Dapp developers no longer have to write chain-specific code; instead, they can just use LayerZero to develop one interface that sends messages to all chains.

“Anything that wants to share or consolidate state across multiple chains — which is practically every application today — should be using LayerZero.”

LayerZero plans to support Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, Arbitrum and Optimism at launch.

It will add support for more EVM chains and non-EVM chains, such as Solana, Polkadot, and Algorand, in the months following launch.

“Binance Labs invests in disruptive innovations that have incredible potential to shape the crypto landscape. We view the future crypto space as a multi-chain universe, with a strong demand for lightweight and secure interoperability solutions. That is the future we see in LayerZero and why we fully support the team,” said Chase Guo, investment director at Binance Labs.

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