Matter Labs - Investor Analysis
Executive summary
New investment opportunity - ZkSync (Matter Labs)- round: total of $258M in funding over 4 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Nov 16, 2022 from a Series C round.
- Homepage: https://matter-labs.io/
- Explorer: V.1 Mainet https://zkscan.io/; V 2.0 Testnet
- Product: Layer 2, soon L3 “Pathfinder”
- Language: supports Account Abstraction, Solidity and Vyper
- Use-Case: Zk-Rollup. EVM compatible - ZkSync 1.0 (limited to swap, trading, paying) - V2 is the first general purpose Rollup (deploy contract etc)
- Team: Marco Cora Head of Business Development; Alex Gluchowski Founder and CEO; Petr Korolev Head of Operations; Angela Lu Product.
- Funding Round & Valuation:
- $258M Funding - https://astrol.pro/project/279
- 200 million grant: Commitment by BitDAO across 5 tranches, first tranche being $40M, and subsequent tranches will be released based on achieved milestones and BitDAO governance vote approval. https://zkdao.io/
- Investors: Seed - Placeholder, DragonFly, 1KX. Following series: A16Z, Lightspeed Ventures, Coinbase ventures, Aave, Consensys, Crypto . com. Covalent, Alchemy etc.
- Competitors: Aztec, Starkware, Polygon, Scroll.
Valuation
- Pros:
- Leading General purpose zk-Rollup, with fast-paced development compared to competitors.
- Well founded, with 200mil (40mil available) for Ecosystem grants and development
- Layer 3 coming Q1 2023, with
- Cons:
- High competition for Dapps and “Dapp chains”.
Future Development: zkSync’s EVM-compatible Layer 3 ‘Opportunity’ prototype will be deployed to public testnet in the first quarter of 2023.
Deal Structure
Raised a total of $258M in funding over 4 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Nov 16, 2022 from a Series C round.
www.crunchbase.com
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/matter-labs/company_financials
Product Use case
Target: Dapp developers, Ethereum users.
Problem: Gas Fees, Scalability.
Feature
- zkSync Layer 2 - V.1 - limited to swap, trading, paying
- zkSync layer 2 - V.2 - General Purpose
- General-Purpose ZK rollup — To support general-purpose applications
- EVM-Compatible — To enable easy porting
- Solidity Support — To support the most common language for smart contract developers
- Open Source — To protect the freedoms to view, change, or fork the code
- Ethereum Ethos Compatible — To represent the values of the ecosystem with a decentralization model
- zkSync layer 3 - Pathfinder
- ZK rollup — Choose this if you want to have the full security of Ethereum (Good for DeFi).
- zkPorter — Choose this if you want a mixture of your data to be made on-chain and off-chain to optimize for cheap, fast, and secure (good for gaming).
- Validium — Choose this if you want ultimate performance with slightly less security than Ethereum (Limitless Use Cases).
With zkSync’s Layer 3 solution, developers will be able to choose from 3 data availability options all using the same proving infrastructure for their project. Developers can choose their own trade-offs between price, performance, and security.
Analysis by Mark Mercatali. Disclaimer: This analysis is based on personal opinion only. This is not intended as investment advice. Do your own research. All company data is owned by the respective owners.
