Ankr, one of the world’s leading Web3 infrastructure providers, is thrilled to announce that it has secured a strategic investment from Binance Labs, the venture capital arm and accelerator of Binance.
Ankr will use the proceeds to double down on its industry leading 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’ 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 the 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
Binance Labs is the venture capital and incubation arm of Binance. It 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.
About Ankr
Ankr helps blockchain companies run their blockchains faster, enabling them to offer users the best Web3 experiences. Launched in 2021, the Ankr Protocol serves 200 billion RPC requests a month across 50 blockchain networks. In 2022, Ankr added the Web3 gaming SDK, multi-chain liquid staking tools, and App Chains to its developer product suite.