coindesk.com
Cross-chain messaging protocol Nomad on Thursday revealed that a slate of crypto heavyweights participated in the $22.4 million seed round at a $225 million valuation that was announced in April.
The newly announced backers included the venture capital arm of crypto exchange Coinbase, non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, OpenSea, Crypto.com Capital, crypto market maker Wintermute, decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Gnosis and the Polygon blockchain. The round was led by crypto investment firm Polychain.
Nomad lets applications send data between blockchains and rollups, which are blockchain scalability solutions, with a focus on security. Security issues in cross-chain bridges have led to notable and expensive exploits, including the $625 million attack on Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network in March. Nomad utilizes optimistic verification, which gives anyone watching a blockchain a short window to challenge questionable on-chain messages.
Use cases for Nomad include users bridging tokens across chains, asset issuers deploying tokens, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) executing cross-chain governance and developers building cross-chain applications, according to the protocol’s website.
Nomad is currently live on the Ethereum mainnet and the Moonbeam, Evmos and Avalanche blockchains. The funding round will in part help Nomad expand to additional chains.
“Because Nomad provides a trust-minimized protocol for cross-chain messaging, there are potential applications that go well beyond just token bridging,” said Polygon co-founder Anurag Arjun in the press release. “We look forward to seeing some of those exciting new use cases come to life on-chain.”