Cross-chain protocol Wormhole announced the completion of $225 million in financing at a valuation of $2.5 billion, making it the largest crypto project financing in 2023. There was no lead investor in this round of financing, with participating investors including Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, ParaFi, Dialectic, Borderless Capital, Arrington Capital and Jump Trading. Saeed Badreg, CEO of Wormhole Labs, said that technically this is the company’s first financing; Jump Crypto, the crypto arm of high-frequency trading company Jump Trading, has been incubating the project for several years. Badreg said that these investors’ equity will consist entirely of token warrants, rather than company equity, and declined to comment on the name of the Wormhole token or when it will be launched (this has not been previously reported).

Additionally, the team behind Wormhole announced the formation of a new company, Wormhole Labs, which will help develop the protocol. Badreg declined to say how the $225 million will be distributed between Wormhole Labs and the Wormhole Foundation, another entity formed in 2021 to encourage developers to use the protocol.

It is reported that since its establishment in 2021, Wormhole has become the core infrastructure of many major blockchains and projects, processing more than 35 billion US dollars in cross-chain fund transfers and more than 750 million cross-chain messages. Dan Reecer, chief operating officer of the Wormhole Foundation, said that the company will continue to promote the construction of Web3 infrastructure and launch more innovative products next year to continue to support the development of the Wormhole developer ecosystem.