Binance Labs Closes $500M Investment Fund to Boost Blockchain, Web3, and Value-Building Technologies

The new fund is supported by teams of leading global institutional investors

Binance Labs, the venture capital and incubation arm of Binance - the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume - announced the closing of a new $500 million investment fund. The fund is supported by leading global institutional investors such as DST Global Partners, Breyer Capital, as well as other major private equity funds, family offices, and corporations as limited partners.

The new fund will invest in projects that can extend the use cases of cryptocurrencies and drive the adoption of Web3 and blockchain technologies.

Changpeng Zhao ‘CZ’, Founder and CEO of Binance, said: “In a Web3 environment, the connection between values, people, and economies is essential, and if these three elements come together to build an ecosystem, that will accelerate the mass adoption of the blockchain technology and crypto. The goal of the newly closed investment fund is to discover and support projects and founders with the potential to build and to lead Web3 across DeFi, NFTs, gaming, Metaverse, social, and more.”

Since 2018, Binance Labs has invested in and incubated more than 100 projects from over 25 countries. Its portfolio includes industry-leading projects such as 1inch, Audius, Axie Infinity, Dune Analytics, Elrond, Injective, Polygon, Optimism, The Sandbox, and STEPN.

Binance Labs makes investments across three different stages: incubation, early-stage venture, and late-stage growth.

With incubation, Binance Labs aims to connect projects with Binance’s network of resources, experts, and mentors to help them drive successful product development and growth. Binance Labs runs its Incubation Program regularly and is currently supporting its fourth cohort.

Early-stage venture investments include token and equity investments across all sectors of cryptocurrency and Web3, including infrastructure, DeFi, NFTs, gaming, Metaverse, social, and crypto adoption platforms.

Late-stage growth investments target more mature companies looking to scale or bridge into the Web3 ecosystem with the Binance ecosystem as a solid strategic partner.

The $500 million investment fund announced today is expected to be allocated to projects spanning all three stages.

Binance Labs Announces Season 4 of Its Global Incubation Program

Binance Labs, the venture capital and innovation incubation arm of Binance, announced that Season 4 of its global Incubation Program is launching on May 5th. Through the program, Binance Labs supports promising projects in the blockchain space. Over 500 projects applied, and Binance Labs selected 14 that demonstrated the most potential and best fit for the program.

For the past three seasons of the Incubation Program, Binance Labs has incubated numerous market-leading crypto platforms and protocols such as Polygon, Perpetual Protocol, Injective Protocol, SafePal, Cere Network, and Dune Analytics.

Application for Season 4 of the Incubation Program began in January 2022, and concluded in April with a total of 500 applications. Mirroring the increasing growth and diversification of the industry, Binance Labs will be incubating a much broader selection of projects.

Ken Li, Investment Director at Binance Labs, said: “The fourth season of our Incubation Program has attracted very exciting founders who are building across a wide range of use cases. We are thrilled to continue to partner with top teams at the earliest stages to support the broader blockchain industry together."

There are 14 incubation projects that have been selected for Season 4 of the Binance Labs Incubation Program:

Infrastructure:

• FilSwan, a layer 2 cross-chain solution provider for Web3 projects that integrates data, computing and payment into one suite.
• Grindery, a middleware Web3 automation tool for people and organizations to connect dApps & protocols to exchange data, payments & services, starting with DAO payouts & payroll.
• NuLink, a decentralized network that enables privacy-preserving applications developers to implement security and privacy.
• Starton, an API platform that facilitates application connectivity to blockchains, allowing developers to develop Web3 functionalities in their products faster and more securely.

Defi:

• CODA Ventures, a yield generating protocol on BNB Chain that provides users passive access to the best-in-class sustainable yield generating strategies.
• OpenLeverage, a permissionless lending and margin trading protocol, deployed on Ethereum and BNB Chain, that enables traders to long/short any trading pair on DEXs.

Gaming / Metaverse:

• AlterVerse, a BNB Chain native project building an advanced Metaverse.
• ChapterX, an immersive 3D platform that enables users to build fully customizable worlds and avatars.
• CoralApp, a blockchain-based fitness and wellness social platform.
• Gamic Guild, a play-to-earn gaming guild in Africa that gives users a diverse catalog of NFT games.

SocialFi / Creator Economy:

• Qwestive, a community management platform for creators and web3 communities.
• Reveel, a platform for web3 creators to track their portfolio, automate revenue sharing and report on-chain income.

Crypto FinTech

• Playbux, a blockchain-based exchange that integrates real-life cashback points and consumer experiences with metaverse activities.
• Ambrosia, a DeFi savings account that allows any user to invest their fiat savings into stablecoins and earn yield in a simple way.

Jasmine Kong, Investor at Binance Labs, said: “We believe that the Incubation Program provides a great growth opportunity for both start-ups and Binance Labs. The team is constantly learning to develop the early stage projects and upgrading the program to offer future projects with more tailored solutions.”

In the coming months, Binance Labs will launch applications for Season 5 of its Incubation Program, which is expected to kick off in Q4 of 2022. As one of the benefits of being part of the Binance Labs ecosystem, all portfolio company founders, mentors or Binance alumni can directly recommend projects to fast-track into the final interview for incubation selection. Interested applicants can apply for the next seasons.

Blockchain-based Open Source Software Maker Tea Raises $8 Mn in Funding Led by Binance Labs

Tea Raises $8 Million Led by Binance Labs to Create New Open Source Software on the Blockchain

Tea, a new company building an open source software platform on the blockchain, today announced an $8 million dollar seed funding round led by Binance Labs, the venture capital and innovation incubator of Binance, the world's leading blockchain ecosystem and cryptocurrency infrastructure provider.

Open source has been foundational for the Internet, underpinning everything online for more than twenty-five years. Tea Co-Founder and CEO Max Howell created the open-source software package management system Homebrew, also known as “brew,” which grew into the most contributed‐to open source software program in the world. Homebrew has been used by tens of millions of developers worldwide and has served as the backbone for the largest technology corporations to build their products without directly contributing to its development. 

Tools like Homebrew are uniquely placed, underneath all developer tools, and thus can manage a fair and equitable transfer of value to the entire open source ecosystem. Tea represents a substantial evolution of traditional open source software, creating a new category in which these volunteer developers are compensated and involved in open governance. 

Tea controls the graph of open source that underpins all modern digital infrastructure. Packages will be released on‐chain as NFTs with their dependency metadata included. As developers use Tea, governance tokens are available according to their actual, real‐life usage in order to drive the entire open source ecosystem.

“Web 2.0 accrued fortunes on the backs of free labor by unpaid open source volunteers,” said co-founder Max Howell. “web3 has the power to change this. There is so much that can be done in this space that nobody has tried before. Tea is an approachable, intuitive collection of tools that will work with both Web 2.0's Internet of today along with web3.”

Tea is decentralized at the day-to-day development and installation layers, which increases reliability and provides a native, built-in “version management” for every tool in the stack. Tea's decentralization also offers tangible benefits to ecosystem security. Every layer of apps and dapps is signed and verified on‐chain.

"We’re not changing the nature of open source. It’s still free,” explained co-founder Timothy Lewis. “Software wants to be free, but programmers need to be compensated. We’re bringing the creator economy to open source. Our vision is to fix how open source is funded and create the tools that will accelerate its creation for the benefit of all humanity."

Ken Li, Investment Director at Binance Labs, said, “We are excited to support Max, Tim and team, as part of our overall investment push into the infrastructure levers that shift Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. We believe the Tea team has the potential to introduce new paradigms that allow open source compensation without direct payment. The platform can solve a core problem for the open-source software development community by utilizing of the key value proposition of decentralized token economies."

This funding will be used by Tea Inc. to hire additional resources to continue work on the protocol, software, and the development of the community. Additional funding participants include XBTO, Lattice Capital, Darma Capital, Coral Capital, Woodstock, Rocktree, SVK, and MAKE services. 

To learn more, visit https://tea.xyz.

About Tea Inc.

Tea Inc. is a Puerto Rico-based corporation that is building the open source toolkit that makes development possible and builds the internet: it’s “brew2 for web3”. Developers can work on any platform, CI/CD on any platform, deploy on any platform; Tea abstracts this detail away so developers can get on with the work that matters. Those interested in joining the team fixing how open source is funded and creating the tools that will accelerate its creation for the benefit of all humanity should reach out on Discord or GitHub. 

Binance Labs Concludes Season 3 of Incubation Program with a Virtual BUIDLer Day

Binance Labs, the venture capital arm and innovation incubator of Binance, the world’s leading blockchain and cryptocurrency infrastructure provider, has today announced a ‘BUIDLer Day’ to conclude another successful season of its incubation program. Now in its third season, the Binance Labs Incubation Program focuses on discovering and supporting the most promising founders and blockchain projects worldwide.

Bill Chin, the Head of Binance Labs Fund, said: “The Binance Labs Incubation Program nurtures budding entrepreneurs that can bring mass adoption of crypto and innovation within the blockchain ecosystem. Participating projects gain access to dedicated resources, industry exposure, valuable networks, and mentorship. Through the Incubation Program, we hope to help future industry key players develop and find their product market fit in the global blockchain landscape. Now that Season 3 is approaching the end, we are actively recruiting for Season 4 of the Incubation Program.”

Launched in 2018, the Binance Labs Incubation Program has incubated 25 projects. The first two seasons of the Incubation Program have produced leading and well-positioned blockchain projects, including Polygon, Perpetual Protocol, Dune Analytics and more.

Season 3 of the Incubation Program began in November 2021, and will conclude on January 25, 2022 with a BUIDLer Day. After 8 weeks of incubation, the BUIDLer Day would allow the nine incubation projects to formally pitch their progress and traction to an audience of investors, mentors and other industry figures. Unlike in past seasons, this invite-only pitch event will be held virtually for Season 3.

Ken Li, Investment Director at Binance Labs, said: “The third season of the Incubation Program saw talented projects coming from different sectors, such as gaming, NFTs, DeFi, trading platform, and more. BUIDLer Day will be the perfect opportunity for the projects to showcase their growth to prominent global investors. We believe that all nine projects have the potential to push the blockchain industry forward in meaningful ways."

The nine projects that were selected and participated in Season 3 of the Incubation Program are Mint Club, Raydius, GAT Network, Wombat Exchange, Tranching Protocol, SkyArk Studio, Bird, Copycat Finance, and Block Ape Scissors.

To enrich the Incubation Program experience, Binance Labs invited mentors from various backgrounds and expertise. The regular weekly fireside chat sessions were joined by Binance CEO CZ, CMO He Yi, Polygon Co-Founder Sandeep Nailwal, Zokyo CEO Hartej Sawhney, CertiK Co-Founder Prof. Ronghui Gu, BBS CEO Eyal Hertzog, and Animoca Brands Chairman Yat Siu.

Throughout the Incubation Program, the incubation projects also had individual sessions with Lisa Wu (Sky Consulting), Rudy Koch (Mythical Games), Leo (Capstone), Kinsey Cronin (TRM Labs), Aniket Jindal (Biconomy), Veronica Wang (SafePal), and Cryan Pellegrino (LayerZero). The whole Binance team also actively got involved in the development of the incubation projects, with 12 internal mentors from Binance Labs, Binance Smart Chain, Binance Research, Binance NFT, and CorpDev.

Application for Season 4 of the Binance Labs Incubation Program is open and available here.

DoraHacks Secures $8 Mn by Binance Labs to Build a More Open-Source Blockchain World

DoraHacks and Binance Labs co-organizing Season 3 of Binance Labs Incubation Program

DoraHacks, a decentralized global developer community and open-source incentive platform, has secured $8 million in strategic investment from Binance Labs, the venture capital arm and innovation incubator of Binance.

DoraHacks is a global hackathon organizer and one of the world's most active Web3 developer communities. It provides Web3 native on-chain toolkits to help developers around the world raise funding for their startups. In 2021 so far, more than 1,000 projects in the DoraHacks community have received over $12 million in grants and donations from worldwide supporters.

Bill Chin, Head of Binance Labs Fund, commented on the investment: “Backing early-stage startups and developers have always been a strategy for Binance Labs. DoraHacks is one of the largest multi-chain developer communities with great Web3 projects emerging. Binance Labs will further build crypto communities with DoraHacks as part of the investment and establish a more open-source and diversified blockchain world. As one of the initiatives, Binance Labs and DoraHacks are co-organizing Season 3 of Binance Labs Incubation Program.”

To support their long-term vision for the growth of the Web3 developer community, DoraHacks and Binance Labs plan to work together on the following areas closely:

• Grants, funding, and incubation resources to back more early-stage Web3 startups
• Joint R&D on innovative decentralized governance technologies and DAO infrastructures
• Strategic Partnership between BSC (Binance Smart Chain) and DoraHacks on BSC Grants, Hackathons and integration of Dora DAO infrastructures

Dora's mission is to create a permanent global hacker movement. The Dora ecosystem includes the decentralized open-source developer community DoraHacks, the open-source developer incentive platform HackerLink.io, the decentralized Hackathon community Hackathon DAO, the "DAO-as-a-Service" infrastructure DoraFactory, as well as dGov middlewares such as Grant Factory, DoraID, privacy voting infrastructure, the Moloch and multisig pallets.

Developers can build and fund decentralized governance DApps for open source communities and future decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) upon the infrastructure provided by DoraHacks and Dora Factory. At present, over 20 mainstream Web3 ecosystems - including BSC, Polygon, Filecoin, Solana, etc. - are already using Dora's infrastructure for quadratic governance of their developer communities. DoraHacks has approximately 100,000 monthly active users from 152 countries around the world.

Eric Zhang, Founder of DoraHacks, said: “Since 2018, DoraHacks has partnered with Binance on 15 global hackathons and grant rounds. Through DoraHacks’ developer events and grant toolkits, Binance has distributed over $2 million in funding to more than 100 teams. This new round of strategic investment will help us accelerate the innovation of developer incentive mechanisms, deliver more effective products to support hackathon organizers and Web3 open source applications, and promote Dora Factory’s infrastructure and ecosystem development. We’re happy to see Binance sharing our vision to support Web3 developers worldwide and help developers innovate freely to change the world.”

Nicole Zhang, Investment Director of Binance Labs Fund, said: “Binance Labs has always been a strong advocate for open-source culture. DoraHacks has developed sophisticated infrastructures to support decentralized voting, funding, and participation for early-stage open-source blockchain projects. We believe DoraHacks’ large blockchain developer community will provide endless support to Binance Labs investment portfolio as well as our greater ecosystem.”

About DoraHacks

DoraHacks is a global hackathon organizer and one of the world's most active Web3 developer communities. DoraHacks provides Web3 native on-chain toolkits to help developers around the world raise funding for their startups. DoraHacks core features range from Quadratic Funding Grant, Bounty, Hackathon, BUIDL NFT, and Continuous Funding. In 2021, over 1,000 projects in the DoraHacks community received more than $12 million in grants and donations from worldwide supporters.

Dora Factory is the DAO-as-a-Service infrastructure in the Dora ecosystem, featuring core governance DApps and Middleware like Grant Factory, Privacy Voting Infrastructure, and DoraID for DAOs and open source communities.

About Binance Labs

Binance Labs identifies, invests, and empowers viable blockchain entrepreneurs, startups, and communities, financing industry projects that help grow the larger blockchain ecosystem. Binance Labs is committed to supporting fast-executing teams who positively impact the crypto space.

Binance Labs to Launch 8-Week Long Season 3 of Incubation Program to Support Promising Projects in the Industry

Binance Labs, the venture capital arm and innovation incubator of Binance, announced Season 3 of the Incubation Program to support promising projects in the blockchain space. The Incubation Program is starting on November 15.

For the past 2 seasons of the Incubation Program, Binance Labs incubated market-leading and successful crypto businesses such as Polygon, Perpetual Protocol, Injective Protocol, SafePal, Cere Network, and Dune Analytics. Through the experience of incubating a wide range of projects at a very early stage, Binance Labs has acquired its own knowhow for developing and elevating projects.

The Incubation Program has some key elements:

• 8-week timeline for incubation projects to take advantage of the Binance Labs ecosystem, with a focus on mentorship from successful portfolio companies of Binance Labs, industry influencers, and potential investors.
• Binance Labs will support value-add services like PR & marketing and fundraising advice
• Incubation teams will join weekly fireside chat sessions with founders of Binance and other top crypto mentors for in-depth discussions
• Incubated projects will exhibit at Binance Labs Demo Day and formally pitch their progress and traction to a wide audience of investors and mentors.

Bill Chin, the Head of Binance Labs Fund, said: “Binance Labs Incubation Program was first created to nurture potential and promising entrepreneurs and projects that can accelerate the adoption and innovation in the industry. Through the Incubation Program, we hope to help the future industry key players go through easier ways of development and I am sure our team and the mentors can also be inspired by the fresh and new insights of the talented founders and teams all around the world."

There are 9 incubation projects that have been selected from the Fall 2021 Edition of the Binance Incubation Program submissions. They are all based in different parts of the world, and they are building products across a wide range of sectors.

• (Game) Block Ape Scissors, a play-to-earn ecosystem built on Binance Smart Chain (BSC), incorporating gaming, NFTs and DeFi together into exciting, diverse and rewarding opportunities.
• (DeFi) Tranching Protocol, a yield optimization and hedging protocol implementing tranching for yield farming.
• (Game) GAT Network, a web of connected NFT trading and gaming projects that already has launched several projects on BSC.
• (DeFi/Stablecoin) Wombat, a trusted wallet for gamers and beyond to manage and trade their NFTs and token on different blockchains.
• (DeFi/Credit) Bird.Money, a new type of decentralized oracle that empowers blockchain developers with access to plug and play analytics products for next generation web platforms
• (Social) Mint Club, a smart token building platform without the need for coding or providing liquidity on the BSC.
• (Bridge) Raydius, a middleware solution designed to create a more connected blockchain ecosystem.
• (Trading) Copycat Finance, decentralized copy trading and copy farming platform on BSC where the innovative social trading meets the high yield social farming revolution.
• (Game) XII Braves (SkyArk Studio), a Singapore-based blockchain gaming studio.

Binance Labs invited mentors from the Binance team, potential investors from different venture capitals, and the leaders of previous incubation projects that went through similar processes as the 9 incubation projects will go through.

Ken Li, Investment Director at Binance Labs said - "All of these incubation projects have strengths in what Labs has been looking into. We are excited to support them at an early stage and contribute to the future of the industry through mentorship."

Chase Guo, Investment Director at Binance Labs added, “Our program has successfully incubated major projects for the industry in the past through other seasons of Incubation Program, and we hope to see the same track records from this season’s projects."

After the 8 weeks of the Incubation Program, Binance Labs will host an official demo day for the 9 projects, open to a broad audience of industry experts, mentors and investors. Through the pitches, projects can appeal to potential investors and find partners who will collaborate with them.

Binance Labs has incubated projects that eventually secured funds from other market players and these projects are well-positioned in the industry.

Polygon, formerly known as Matic Network, is one of such projects leading the industry. As an Ethereum scaling aggregator to scale up Ethereum through various scaling approaches, the project has gone through a steady development. Last year, Polygon became the most adoption solution in the industry with 3000+ Dapps and achieving DAUs higher than that of Ethereum mainchain itself. Next year, Polygon is working hard to become the biggest player in the ZK technology scaling. Polygon has already acquired and initiated various ZK initiatives.

Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder of Polygon, attending as one of the mentors for the Season 3 Incubation Program, said “Binance Labs Incubation Program was an important momentum if we see the history of this project. Through the programs Binance Labs has prepared, we could develop our business more, and eventually, we were able to launch our tokens through the Launchpad. On top of the financial investment Binance Labs made, the project was able to secure additional funding through the Launchpad and the attention of crypto users. We hope that through the Season 3 of Incubation Program, future market leaders can be discovered and incubated."

Dorahacks, a global hackathon organizer and one of the world's most active developer communities, is co-organizing the Season 3 of Incubation Program with Binance Labs. DoraHacks' open source developer platform and curation market, HackerLink, provides unique on-chain tools to incentivize open source developments around the world.

Binance Labs will also launch applications for its Season 4 Incubation Program, which will kick off in March of 2022. As one of the benefits of being part of the Binance Labs ecosystem, all portfolio company founder, mentor or Binance alumni can directly recommend projects to fast-track into the final interview for incubation selection. Interested applicants can apply for the program here.

Binance Labs, the Venture Capital and Incubator of Binance, and Multicoin Capital Co-led the $6m Funding Round for Layerzero

Binance is has announced that Binance Labs, the venture capital and incubator of Binance, and Multicoin Capital co-led the $6M funding round for LayerZero, an omnichain interoperability protocol that unites decentralized applications across disparate blockchains.

Sino Global Capital, Defiance, Delphi Digital, Robot Ventures, Spartan, Hypersphere Ventures, Protocol Ventures, Gen Block Capital, Echelon Capital also participated in this round.

LayerZero is a new interoperability protocol that connects disparate blockchains. Interoperability hinges on passing messages between chains; current solutions achieve this with a middle-chain (hub-and-spoke model) such as Polkadot or running pairwise on-chain light nodes such as Cosmos IBC.

The former solution centralizes security around a single hub, allowing for cheap transactions at the cost of a single point of failure. The latter achieves high security with on-chain validation but is both capital and resource-intensive. LayerZero brings the best of both worlds together with a novel on-chain "Ultra Light Node," which achieves the security of a light node with the cost-effectiveness of middle chains.

“DeFi applications have spread out and deployed across multiple chains due to high fees and evolving investors preferences. This has led to severe fragmentation across the market. You can currently trade on Sushi using Ethereum, Moonbeam, Fantom, xDAI, and Binance Smart Chain, and more chains are coming. While all of these applications are Sushi, but none alone is Sushi. LayerZero solves this problem by uniting liquidity across chains and making it possible to transact in, out, and across disparate networks with ease,” said Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder, LayerZero.

LayerZero plans to support Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, Arbitrum and Optimism at launch. It will add support for more EVM chains and non-EVM chains, such as Solana, Polkadot, and Algorand, in the months following launch.

"Binance Labs invests in disruptive innovations that have incredible potential to shape the crypto landscape. We view the future crypto space as a multi-chain universe, with a strong demand for lightweight and secure interoperability solutions. That is the future we see in LayerZero and why we fully support the team," said Chase Guo, Investment Director at Binance Labs.

LayerZero achieves speed, security, and cost-efficiency by performing the same validation as an on-chain light node but instead of keeping all block headers sequentially, block headers are streamed on-demand by decentralized oracles. This is a fundamentally new interoperability model that improves security by coordinating validation between nodes and oracles. LayerZero currently leverages Chainlink and Band Protocol for oracles but was designed to be oracle agnostic.

LayerZero paves the way for the first omnichain applications, opening the door for lending, AMMs, governance and much more to become truly chain agnostic,” said Kyle Samani, Managing Partner, Multicoin Capital. "Dapp developers no longer have to write chain-specific code; instead, they can just use LayerZero to develop one interface that sends messages to all chains. Anything that wants to share or consolidate state across multiple chains—which is practically every application today—should be using LayerZero."

LayerZero will use the new funds to further the development of LayerZero endpoints across the ecosystem and drive the adoption of the protocol. The project is currently under audit and is expected to launch in early Q4 2021.

About Binance

Binance is the world’s leading blockchain and cryptocurrency infrastructure provider with a financial product suite that includes the largest digital asset exchange by volume. Trusted by millions worldwide, the Binance platform is dedicated to increasing the freedom of money for users, and features an unmatched portfolio of crypto products and offerings, including: trading and finance, education, data and research, social good, investment and incubation, decentralization and infrastructure solutions, and more. For more information, visit: https://www.binance.com.