Wormhole raises $225M at $2.5B valuation

Cross-chain protocol Wormhole has secured a $225-million investment at a valuation of $2.5 billion.

According to the Nov. 29 announcement, the investment round was led by Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Jump Trading, ParaFi, Dialectic, Borderless Capital and Arrington Capital.

The Wormhole Foundation also announced the launch of Wormhole Labs, which the company said “is an independent technology company that specializes in building products, tools, and reference implementations that help grow cross-chain activity and development.” Currently, its blockchain-to-blockchain communications technology is used to bridge assets, power oracle data feeds, and transfer nonfungible tokens.

Wormhole was launched in 2021 and has since facilitated over $35 billion in transactions. Developers claim that the protocol processes over 2 million cross-chain messages across more than 30 chains every day.

In February 2022, Wormhole was hacked for more than $321 million via an unauthorized minting glitch on its Ethereum–Solana bridge. Shortly after the incident, venture capital firm Jump Crypto pledged to replenish more than $320 million in funds lost during the hack.

In May, investors of the former Terra ecosystem filed a lawsuit against Jump Trading, the high-frequency trading firm that owns Jump Crypto, alleging the firm and its CEO, Kanav Kariya, manipulated the price of TerraUSD to gain roughly $1.3 billion in profits. The allegations have not yet been proven in court.

Related: Jump Crypto replenishes funds from $320M Wormhole hack in largest-ever DeFi ‘bailout’