A layer-1 blockchain called Linera announced the closing of a new $6 million fundraising round headed by venture capital firm Borderless Capital in an effort to address scalability difficulties using “microchains.”The company has now raised a total of $12 million in investment and was formed by Mathieu Baudet, a former engineer for Meta Novi (Meta’s digital wallet, which will be discontinued in September).Linera will be using the new funding for “expanding the team, launching a devnet and a testnet for the protocol and fostering a strategic presence in the APAC region while continuing to grow their developer academy,” the company said in a statement.
The layer-1 is pioneering the idea of “microchains” within the blockchain, according to the press release. “The competition for blockspace in traditional layer-1 blockchains, coupled with limited production rates and block sizes, creates a bottleneck during traffic peaks, leaving users outpriced or delayed, rendering the infrastructure effectively unavailable,” the press release said.
Instead of boosting the block size or manufacturing rate, Linera is combating this problem by including smaller chains into its network.This paradigm enables the creation of individual, lightweight chains for each user that integrate with mobile and browser add-ons to support wallet-based Web3 app interactions.By enabling an infinite number of smaller user chains, the project seeks to replicate Web2 apps’ expansion possibilities in Web3 apps, according to the announcement.
Flow Traders, Eterna Capital, and Laser Digital Ventures (Nomura) are some of the investors in the latest round.The company’s inaugural seed investment was headed last year by A16z Crypto and Tribe Capital.