PayPal co-leads $20M seed funding for on-chain risk optimizer Chaos Labs

PayPal co-leads M seed funding for on-chain risk optimizer Chaos Labs

Chaos Labs protects crypto protocols against external exploits and risks with an automated risk management platform.

Payments giant PayPal and investment management firm Galaxy joined hands to raise $20 million in seed funding for Chaos Labs, a New York-based cloud platform for securing blockchains and protocols.

With an automated risk management platform, Chaos Labs protects crypto protocols against external exploits and risks. The platform does this by offering agent and scenario-based simulations, which helps secure protocols against economic vulnerabilities and market manipulation events.

The seed funding is aimed at helping Chaos Labs further automate on-chain risk optimization.

1/ We are thrilled to announce we have secured $20M in seed funding led by @galaxyhq and @PayPal to automate on-chain risk optimization! pic.twitter.com/gVnarbmFSk
— omer (@omeragoldberg) February 21, 2023

The funding round saw participation from 23 organizations and six angel investors. Prominent names among the lot include Coinbase Ventures, Polygon, Avalanche, OpenSea UniSwap and Balaji Srinivasan.

*Participants of Chaos Labs’ seed funding. Source: Chaos Labs*

According to Chaos Labs’ founder and CEO, Omer Goldberg, financial risk management must be upgraded to cater to the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems. He added:

“We believe that every DeFi protocol must regularly conduct robust risk testing to verify and validate that their economic system is secure against hackers and unanticipated volatility.”

The official website states that Chaos Labs’ risk suite can help protect DeFi protocols through optimized risk and capital efficiency, streamlined risk assessments and streamlined risk assessments.

PayPal’s interest in the crypto ecosystem was highlighted when the company was found to be holding a significant part of its financial liabilities in cryptocurrencies offered to its customers.

As Cointelegraph reported, by the end of 2022, PayPal held a total of $604 million in various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). The information was found on the annual report filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on Feb. 10.

Bitcoin accounts for $291 million in the firm’s asset breakdown, with $250 million in ETH. The remaining $63 million includes Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash combined.

Solana Ecosystem raises million in strategic investments from OKEx, MXC exchanges

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Over 50 market-ready projects have launched on Solana over the past month. The new capital infusion will help accelerate the growth and development of key projects.

The Solana Foundation, the grants program behind the Solana high-performance blockchain, has inked partnerships with cryptocurrency exchanges OKEx and MXC to launch two strategic investment funds designed to fuel the ecosystem’s expansion.

The two funds, which are collectively valued at $40 million, will help Solana bring more of its decentralized applications and protocols to market.

Anatoly Yakovenko, president of the Solana Foundation, said the blockchain platform has “grown multitudes in the past few months” both in terms of volume of projects and active developers. He said the Solana team will work alongside its new funders to “support the next wave of killer dApps.”

OKEx’s contribution comes by way of the Block Dream Fund, which was founded in February 2021 with $100 million in starting capital. Block Dream Fund has already invested in multiple projects, including Cook Protocol and Plasma Network.

Funding from OKEx will go toward Solana’s international marketing and endorsement efforts. Dora, the founder of Block Dream Fund, said the investment firm “looks forward to providing continued support to companies building on Solana.”

An executive at MXC Exchange, an Asian spot-trading cryptocurrency platform, explained that the Solana partnership “ties in naturally with our vision and market position.”

Solana says over 50 market-ready projects launched on its platform last month, including DeFi applications and NFT markets. Solana is looking to draw more DeFi actors to its network as competition with Ethereum — the premier DeFi builder protocol — heats up. In pursuit of that goal, the project recently announced $200,000 in seed funding as part of a DeFi hackathon.

As of Thursday, more than $61 billion has been locked into DeFi projects, according to the latest industry data.

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