Just two days after the launch of its ANKR token staking to allow Web3 users to earn rewards, Web3 infrastructure provider Ankr announced today it has received a strategic investment from Binance Labs to further improve the scalability of blockchain networks. The total amount of funding was not disclosed.
Ankr will use the funding proceeds to ramp up the work on its remote procedure call (RPC) service and build out its Web3 developer suite, including its Liquid Staking SDK, Web3 Gaming SDK, and App Chains As a Service. Ankr Protocol serves an average of over 7 billion blockchain requests per day across the 18 blockchains it hosts RPCs for.
Binance Labs is the venture capital arm and accelerator of the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance.
Binance Labs’ strategic investment follows Ankr’s significant open-source contributions to the BNB Chain, BNB Liquid Staking, and its continued support for the ecosystem. All BNB Chain projects and users can benefit hugely from Ankr’s upgrades to the network. A faster and more efficient BNB Chain will accelerate Web3 adoption.
“We are very excited to count Binance Labs as a strategic investor. BNB Chain is by far the chain with the highest number of daily transactions and active users.” said Ryan Fang, the Chief Operating Officer at Ankr. “We are committed to support BNB Chain further scale, enhance BNB token utility by enabling DeFi composability using BNB Liquid Staking, and expand Binance Application Sidechain (BAS) ecosystem to enable innovative use cases requiring a highly scalable infrastructure, and other innovative infrastructure services opening the gates to permissioned sidechains.”
Ankr built out BNB Chain’s core infrastructure including their Erigon upgrade, Archive Node upgrade, and the latest BNB Application Sidechain (BAS) scalability solution. The Erigon upgrade reduced the storage requirements by 75% and increased the RPC request performance by 10x.
It further supported the BNB Chain ecosystem with BNB Liquid Staking that brings DeFi composability on top of staked BNB. Liquid Staking gives BNB token holders an array of options when choosing how to earn in DeFi with their assets – with the ability to combine strategies like staking, farming, lending, contributing to vaults, and more simultaneously.
Working in the background, Ankr makes using dApps, wallets, and crypto games possible by connecting them to the blockchains they need to communicate with. If you think of all Web3 projects and dApps as city blocks, Ankr is like the underlying utility service that powers it all.
About Binance Labs
Founded in 2017, Binance Labs identifies, invests, and empowers viable blockchain entrepreneurs, startups, and communities, financing industry projects that help grow the larger blockchain ecosystem. 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.
Launched in 2021, Ankr helps blockchain companies run their blockchains faster, enabling them to offer users the best Web3 experiences. The Ankr Protocol serves 250 billion RPC requests a month across 50 blockchain networks and runs RPC services for 18 blockchain partners, making it the largest RPC provider in the industry.
