Wormhole, the company behind a cross-blockchain messaging protocol, announced today that it secured a gigantic $225 million investment at a valuation of $2.5 billion, making it the most significant cryptocurrency-related funding round of 2023.
According to the announcement, the fundraiser was joined by Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, ParaFi, Dialectic, Borderless Capital, Arrington Capital, and Jump Trading.
The company’s technology bridges assets between blockchains, allowing users to move nonfungible tokens between other chains. A nonfungible pass 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 fundraising, the team behind Wormhole also announced the formation of Wormhole Labs. This new independent company will grow the development of the cross-chain protocol’s products, tools, and reference implementations.
Wormhole claims that it has facilitated the transfer of more than $35 billion in value since its launch. It regularly processes over 2 million cross-chain messages across over 30 chains daily.
Developers incubated Wormhole 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 Bloomberg first 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, which is dedicated to advancing the technology that makes efficient blockchain-to-blockchain communication possible.”
As a company, Wormhole has seen 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 over $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, accused the firm of manipulating the token for roughly $1.3 billion in profit, creating the conditions that caused the crash.