Union Labs raises $4 million to build cross-chain infrastructure

Union Labs, the developer of a blockchain interoperability layer Union, has raised $4 million in its seed funding, according to details shared with Invezz.

Venture capital firms Galileo, Semantic Ventures, Nascent and Tioga Capital co-led the investment round. Lightshift and Chorus One also participated in the funding round, Union Labs said.

Union's cross-chain infrastructure

Per details in a blog post, the seed funding will be used to develop a bridge that connecting appchains, Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks. Funds will also be used to expand the team and to develop the platform’s API to allow for more interoperability across blockchains.

Karel Kubat, founder of Union Labs, commented:

Union’s infrastructure layer offers a unique consensus engine that does not rely on oracles, multi-signatures, or MPC (Multi-Party Computation) and other third parties for security, scalability or interoperability.

Unlike on other bridging solutions, relayers don’t get any special authority on Union, which ensures private keys are not a target for hackers. Messages verification is via zero-knowledge proofs.

Union enables Cosmos’ Inter Blockchain Communication (IBC) on Ethereum via two components of its ZK bridge architecture.

CometBLS is an augmentation of Tendermint and a consensus verification mechanism that allows for fast execution, low operational costs, and decentralised infrastructure. The other component is Galois, the prover.