Matter Labs, a startup co-founded by a Ukrainian, raises $50 million

Matter Labs, a startup founded by Ukrainian Alex Gluchowski, developing the Ethereum blockchain scaling protocol, has raised $50 million. AIN.UA shares details of the deal.

• The $50 million funding was received during a Series B funding round. The startup had previously raised $6 million in a Series A round in February 2021.
• As TechCrunch reports, the round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Placeholder, Dragonfly, Blockchain.com, Crypto.com, 1kx, and other investors.
• Matter Labs will use the funding to expand its scientific and engineering teams and finance its business growth.
• The startup is now recruiting teams in Kyiv and Berlin, and there are a dozen open positions.
• Matter Labs was founded in 2019. The founders are Ukrainian Alex Gluchowski and Russian Alexandr Vlasov, who moved to Europe before settling in Canada.

What does Matter Labs do?

As cryptocurrencies become more popular, many new users and decentralized app developers are discovering that Ethereum’s insufficient network volume limits have made it a pretty crowded place to do business due to slow transactions and exorbitant fees. Matter Labs is developing an Ethereum blockchain scaling protocol that reduces traffic on the central Ethereum blockchain by offloading the hard work of transaction processing to efficient secondary chains that record data of transaction batches to the main Ethereum network. This solution allows developers to reap the benefits of faster and cheaper transactions without losing the security of the Ethereum ecosystem. Matter Labs is building Zero-Knowledge (ZK) Proof technology on Ethereum. The company launched its first publicly available ZK rollup prototype in 2019.