Binance Labs unveils strategic investment in Aptos Labs

Binance Lab, a venture capital division of the major cryptocurrency exchange Binance, announced a strategic investment in the blockchain project Aptos Labs on March 28.

Founded in 2021, Aptos Labs is a layer 1 blockchain project led by some of the former team members of Meta’s now-dissolved stablecoin project Diem (formerly Libra). The project was shelved after it failed to overcome regulatory hurdles tossed its way.

Binance’s interest in the project came after Aptos Labs raised $200 million in its funding round just four months after launching. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Tiger Global, Multicoin Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Coinbase Ventures, FTX Ventures, Paxos, Hashed, ParaFi Capital, and Katie Haun as participants.

With the latest funding, Binance plans to support the fund throughout its development stages, infrastructure building, hackathons, and code review. Bill Qian, Head of Binance Labs, said in the announcement:

“We believe in the same vision that Aptos sees – building a more reliable and scalable blockchain for everybody. Eventually, the blockchain that can be used by the masses will be able to drive mass adoption of users in a wide variety of applications and accelerate technological and business innovation in those fields. Users can expect a secure and seamless experience of blockchains.”

As a smart contract platform, Aptos seeks to compete with layer 1 blockchains like Ethereum (ETH), Terra (LUNA), and Solana (SOL) by adopting “Move,” which is based on the Rust programming language. The company has already launched the testnet and its mainnet is expected to launch in the third quarter of 2022.