Gary Cripps 
Matter Labs, the full-stack scaling and integration platform for Ethereum, raised $200 million from strategic angel investors and venture firms. This raise is Matter Labs’ first round of external funding and will be used to help the company scale Ethereum to reach its full potential.
This article will cover how Matter Labs plans to use this funding to scale Ethereum.
Overview of Matter Labs
Matter Labs is a technology company focused on using breakthrough scaling technologies to create the next generation of decentralised public blockchain platforms. Founded in 2019 and based in London, the company has attracted some of the industry’s most talented professionals, entrepreneurs, and researchers. In addition, the company is backed by leading venture capital firms such as a16z Crypto, Galaxy Digital, and Khosla Ventures.
The team at Matter Labs includes experts from leading organisations such as Microsoft Research, Google Brain Toronto and Deloitte Blockchain Lab, and successful entrepreneurs from Ethereum-based projects such as Augur, MakerDAO and 0x Protocol. The team works tirelessly to develop new ways to scale Ethereum using zk-SNARKs technology.
In March 2020, Matter Labs announced that it had raised $200 million in a Series A funding round led by investors including Moore Strategic Ventures founded by Louis Bacon, FinTech Collective CIO Meltem Demirors and entrepreneur Astra Taylor. With this sizable funding injection Matter Labs are now better positioned to accelerate development of their next-gen scaling technologies for Ethereum while growing the engineering teams to ensure their long term success for enterprise blockchain use cases.
This update will introduce how Matter labs intend to utilise the extra funds to scale the Ethereum network for developers and enterprise customers alike.
Matter Labs Raises $200 Million to Scale Ethereum
Matter Labs recently raised $200 million to scale Ethereum. This funding will help the company advance its technology and increase the throughput of the Ethereum blockchain. With this four year investment, Matter Labs seeks to provide the most secure and reliable platform with the highest scalability, cost-efficiency and usability standards on Ethereum.
The funds will be utilised primarily towards research and development of scaling technologies such as zkRollups, sharding and data availability solutions. These scaling solutions will enable Layer 2 protocols to be optimised while simultaneously reducing transaction costs significantly. Furthermore, this investment round also emphasises developing smart contracts that can be rolled out quickly and securely to improve developer efficiency in dealing with complex financial contracts.
In addition, Matter Labs plans to enhance scalability by optimising its existing virtual machine already being used in enterprise deployments via Microsoft Azure deployments around the globe. The team will also employ additional resources for community building initiatives including open source grant programs, education initiatives and close support for any project on building Ethereum applications or tools.
Finally, Matter Labs is working side-by-side with industry-leading organisations such as Consensys to create a unique positioning within the DeFi space towards creating an effective infrastructure for decentralised finance applications that are completely trustless and secure yet highly usable by all users within Ethereum’s ecosystem.
Matter Labs is a technology company focused on using breakthrough scaling technologies to create the next generation of decentralised public blockchain platforms.
Matter Labs’ Plans for the Funds
Matter Labs raised $200 million to scale Ethereum. This is a massive milestone for the firm and the entire Ethereum community.
The funds will launch Matter Labs’ Protocol and Core Layer. With this, they aim to make Ethereum more secure, scalable, and ready for mass adoption.
Let’s look into the details of how the funds will be used.
Investing in Ethereum’s Infrastructure
Matter Labs plans to use the recently-announced $200 million in funding to build on Ethereum’s infrastructure. This includes increasing scalability, speed, security and performance while ensuring Ethereum is accessible to users of all experience levels. The company believes this investment can help mainstream DeFi and unlock its full financial potential.
To scale Ethereum, Matter Labs will focus on two primary pieces of technology: zkSync and ZKRollup. ZkSync is a scaling solution that allows users to move funds off-chain, making transfers faster and cheaper. Meanwhile, ZKRollup is an optimised Layer 2 scaling solution that allows many transactions to be batched off-chain for improved performance and costs.
In addition, Matter Labs will look for ways to improve the user onboarding experience so more people can easily access DeFi products with minimal hassle. This may include developing better wallet features or integrations with services like Coinbase or Anchorage. The company also plans to invest in Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs) that further advance the platform’s capabilities from both a scalability and security perspective.
Developing Scalable Solutions
The Ethereum-based startup Matter Labs has recently closed a $200 million Series B funding round from notable investors, including Polychain Capital, Paradigm and Solana Labs. With the new funds, Matter Labs plans to create solutions that could scale the Ethereum network to billions of users and bring about a new era of blockchain-based financial products.
To achieve this goal, Matter Labs will focus on two key initiatives. The first is developing ZK Rollups — a layer-2 technology which enables users to dramatically reduce ETH transaction fees while still enjoying the security of being on the main Ethereum chain. In addition, they are building an integrated development environment (IDE) where developers can quickly deploy optimised solutions on their blockchain infrastructure.
With this funding, Matter Labs will also be able to embark on more ambitious projects such as creating enterprise-scale permissionless finance systems and permissioned blockchains tailored specifically for businesses. Additionally, they plan to continue researching technologies such as shards and hybrid PoS/PoW solutions to further increase scalability and decentralisation on the Ethereum network.
Expanding the Team
As part of their plans for the funds, Matter Labs is focused on expanding their teams across engineering and product design. This includes bringing in experienced engineers passionate about building technologies that will scale Ethereum so that it can fully realise its potential to power the global financial and data infrastructure.
The team has committed to growing to 250 people over the next 24 months, including senior engineers in blockchain technology, distributed systems and browser infrastructure. All hires will be based on collaboration, transparency and decentralisation principles.
Matter Labs is also dedicated to increasing diversity across the company. This means hiring team members from diverse backgrounds through widespread outreach campaigns and building partnerships with universities worldwide. Ultimately, Matter Labs strives to build an inclusive environment where everyone can bring their unique experience, knowledge and skill sets to impact Ethereum’s growth.
Impact on Ethereum
Matter Labs recently raised $200 million in a series A funding round to scale Ethereum’s network.
The funding round presents an important opportunity to further develop the Ethereum network and support the growth of decentralised finance (DeFi) applications.
Let’s talk about the impact of this funding on the Ethereum network, including the advantages and drawbacks.
Increased Adoption
Matter Labs is focusing on increasing Ethereum’s adoption by building a new scaling solution for the network. The main goal of their 250-million-dollar initiative is to create a competitive ecosystem for the number two ranking cryptocurrency by market capitalization. This will involve boosting the blockchain’s usability and scalability. CEO Jutta Steiner said, “we believe that second layer scaling can enable massive growth in Ethereum’s user base and thus its potential applications.”
The company plans to use the funds to develop ZK-Rollup technology as they believe that this approach helps provide Ethereum with a secure, efficient and stable platform to deliver cost savings at scale. In addition, this innovative scaling solution leverages existing infrastructure to provide low gas fees and throughput, enabling users to process more transactions than ever before without sacrificing security or decentralisation. The team also plans on researching alternative technologies such as plasma for decentralised applications (DApps), rollups for gaming and DEXs, snark-based payments systems, race conditions and other scalability options available in different contexts.
In addition, the money will be used for further business development, marketing strategies and expanding the team so that Matter Labs can help fuel ETH adoption through second-layer solutions compliant with existing standards of compliance and security as delivering affordable transaction fees compared to current models.
Improved Security
Matter Labs is working to ensure Ethereum can scale securely, and this will be the primary focus of their $200 million investment. They plan to use the funds to improve its security by creating a new zk-SNARKs (zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge) protocol. This protocol uses a deterministic process to deal with issues related to scalability and security, allowing for improved throughput on complex transactions.
Moreover, Matter Labs will bring about advanced layer-two solutions for Ethereum such as ZkRollup and Optimistic Rollup that can send thousands of transactions in seconds through off-chain channels. Layer two solutions like these could allow users to scale without sacrificing security or privacy – something that other scaling solutions often compromise on. Not only this, Matter Labs could also create better tools for developers, making it easier for them to build on Ethereum and enhance its user experience. Furthermore, with more robust tools, it could become easier to develop applications with fewer mistakes leading to an overall boost in usability of the Ethereum network and its dapps.
In addition, Matter Labs will look for ways to improve the user onboarding experience so more people can easily access DeFi products with minimal hassle. This may include developing better wallet features or integrations with services like Coinbase or Anchorage.
Improved Scalability
Scalability problems have long plagued the Ethereum network due to its limited block size and lack of consensus mechanisms. However, several solutions have been proposed to address these issues, such as the Plasma Cash & More Viable Plasma (MVP) projects and the Scalable Autonomous Participation (SAP) update.
Plasma Cash and MVP help reduce transaction times and fees by creating chains of transactions off the main blockchain. These chains allow users to create “child” chains that perform faster with fewer network resources while retaining trust in the underlying blockchain. This allows more transactions to be processed in parallel, drastically increasing scalability on the network. In addition, the SAP update improves the consensus process optimised for rapid role changes without compromising on finalise performance or security guarantees.
In addition, Ethereum 2.0 is a major upgrade planned for the Ethereum Network that includes an improved scaling solution using a new form of Proof-of-Stake called “sharding.” This means storing parts of each state across multiple different computers on the same shard at one time instead of all on one node like proof-of-work protocol calls for. This dramatically improves scalability while providing much higher decentralisation and security than before as more nodes become involved in data storage and validation duties. Furthermore, Ethereum Layer 2 solutions such as rollups have already achieved massive successes in improving scalability while keeping decentralisation at a minimum cost point; however, further improvements are expected soon with Sybil resistant rollups set to release shortly after launch day.
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