imToken Announces $30 Million Seed Round and zkSync L2 Support
3 min readAsian decentralized crypto wallet provider imToken has secured a huge Series B seed round while announcing a partnership with Matter Labs for Layer 2 development.
Asia’s largest crypto wallet company imToken has completed a funding round with lead investment from Qiming Venture Partners. IDG Capital and Breyer Capital have also participated.
The $30 million round will be used to accelerate platform innovation, build a dedicated research arm, and recruit top talent.
imToken was founded in 2016 because of the lack of user-friendly entry avenues into the crypto space. The Chinese crypto wallet provider claims 12 million users from over 150 countries. It also has more than $50 billion in assets currently placed on the platform.
Beyond its non-custodial wallets, imToken plans to provide access to a suite of DeFi services in its next iteration, imToken 3.0.
Matter Labs Partnership
On March 29, imToken also revealed that it was joining forces with Layer 2 solutions provider Matter Labs. This partnership will focus on developing scaling solutions.
imToken stated that natively supporting rollup technology zkSync will vastly improve wallet functionality, transaction speeds, and costs for its users.
“We also believe in this joined effort being a step towards the future of the ETH ecosystem, with rollups at its core.”
zkSync speeds up ETH transactions by using zero knowledge rollups to batch transactions and process them off the root chain. It can also provide security guarantees comparable to a normal smart contract on Layer 1.
Rock on Roll! Announcing native support for @zkSync
Details below: @the_matter_labs https://t.co/XpXB8JtqJI
— imToken Crypto Wallet – BTC, ETH, DeFi ++ (@imTokenOfficial) March 29, 2021
zkSync developers Matter Labs announced its own Series A funding round on March 1. This round was led by some big names in crypto and web security including Union Square Ventures, Cloudflare, and Coinbase.
Layer 2 Wallets Rolling Out
In addition to native support for zkSync, imToken also opened a Layer 2 category in the dApp browser. Its goal is to provide “high-quality” L2 applications to users.
“We believe that when more wallets support Layer 2s, ETH can break through the bottleneck and usher in the next stage of greater development.”
The firm’s wallet lead, Ashu, said that in the future, imToken will integrate more L2 projects. This is because it hopes to provide users with a simple-to-use ecosystem as an entry point for fast, low-cost experiences.
Matter Labs founder Alex Gluchowski added:
“We are especially excited to have imToken support us bringing zkSync to their user base. Being popular in China, the team can help us expand to Asian markets.”
imToken is headquartered in Singapore but also has offices in Hangzhou, Taiwan, and the U.S.
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