Binance's Venture Capital Arm Increases Funding In Blockchain Startup Aptos

Leading crypto exchange Binance's venture capital arm and accelerator Binance Labs has made another strategic investment in Aptos Labs, a blockchain startup formed by ex-Meta employees working on the social media giant's Diem stablecoin project.

According to the Thursday announcement, Binance had first invested in Aptos, a "next-generation layer-1 blockchain built with safety and user experience in mind," in March this year but the financial details were not revealed.

"At Binance, we've always believed in the power of blockchain technology to benefit the masses, just like the Internet. However, infrastructure building remains a bottleneck within the industry. We believe that the technological competitiveness of the Aptos team could bring increased scalability to the blockchain infrastructure while also supporting novel use cases for Web3," Yi He, co-founder of Binance and head of Binance Labs, said.

The funds will be used by the Aptos team to expand its talent and also support the development of its layer-1 infrastructure. Layer-1 blockchains are the base blockchains and some examples are Binance Smart Chain, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others.

The Binance blog further added that it has been three years since the development team of 350 members is building the Layer-1 infrastructure and the blockchain is "designed to be upgradeable and will continuously evolve to support current and emerging Web3 use cases."

As per a previous report, Aptos raised $150 million in a funding round in which FTX Ventures, the venture arm of crypto exchange FTX, and Jump Crypto, a division of the Jump Trading Group, participated. The Series A funding round was also graced by Griffin Gaming Partners, Franklin Templeton, Circle Ventures and Superscrypt.

Meanwhile, the Aptos blockchain is also working on several features to maximize the utilization of available physical resources and improve hardware efficiency.

"Our goal is to deliver the most performant, production-ready blockchain through a flexible, modular architecture designed for people-first usability and engineered to upgrade and evolve," said Aptos CEO Mo Shaikh.

"The continued strategic support of the Binance Labs team helps us further empower our ecosystem to create next-generation applications that solve existing consumer challenges, and the challenges still to come," Shaikh added.