Layer-1 Blockchain ZetaChain Secures $27M in New Funding Round

Flare on Blockchain. Zeta chain has just raised $27 million in new funding round in a bid to bring universal interoperability to crypto. Joining us now is Zeta chain head of product Brandon. Welcome to the show. Brandon. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. Now, we've had a few layer ones on the show. In recent days, we had a few layer twos talk to us about why we need another layer one. I've asked everyone that and what the what the differentiator is here. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you see a lot of new L one S two S roll ups ecosystems popping up for us. Data change approach is not really to, you know, siphon liquidity and users and all of that from other chains, but more amplify them. So you know, like building public goods that connect the ecosystem together and save chain does that by being able to write and deploy contracts that you can essentially take input from and output to any chain, including non smart contract chains like Bitcoin. So um just unlocking a lot of liquidity and seamlessness for users to actually use a chain for what it's actually useful for rather than this sort of chain tribalism. You, you kind of see today, I'm still kind of confused if you don't mind. I I can you explain what it does? Like what, what exactly. So data chain is a new one that you can deploy smart contracts onto. But those smart contracts can read and write from other chains. So you could say deploy a uni swap like a DEX on data chain. But that can take input directly from Bitcoin. Like you can send Bitcoin from your Bitcoin wallet and then output to Matic on polygon. So all of the logic is in one place rather than the sort of like asynchronous messaging approach or bridging approach that you kind of see today that ends up putting a lot of user assets at risk with this. It's always dealing with native assets. And uh yeah, lets you do things that are that are very complex, but in one sense outside of trading, what are some other use use cases? Yeah, I I think uh when you look at like identity and all the account abstraction stuff, you're uh you might see nowadays you can have a user name on data chain that can custody all of your assets, you know, be it memberships, NFTS uh all that but in one place so a user can just come into crypto from knowing nothing, have a wallet that accesses everything in crypto. Uh And then I think another exciting piece is the Bitcoin player. So uh being able to finally activate or use your Bitcoin with the rest of crypto. Uh So right now when you look at a normal Bitcoin user, they kind of just have it in their ledger or wallet and they have no notion of how to activate it or use it or whatever. Uh But now you can do that in a single step. So, uh unlocking this dormant Bitcoin user base with the interoperability, you know, I think we've been a little bit trained to think about vulnerability and risks because of what's happened. Um With a lot of the bridges, we've seen what are some of the vulnerabilities and risks associated with this solution when we compare it to bridges? Yeah. So I think when you look at vulnerabilities in bridges, it often ends up being this pattern of you have, you're issuing a new wrapped asset and that essentially means that you have this honeypot where everyone's depositing their assets into it to mint on the different side. And when that honeypot is compromised, then you end up with a bridge hack and then everyone with assets on the other side is uh yeah, that all of that loses value. So with data chain, you can actually build a quote unquote bridge where the value that is transferred is just pegged against zeta chain's token data. So you have any token, you swap the data that's burned by the protocol, mint it on the other side and then swap to your destination asset. Uh So then you're only dealing with native assets. Once you, once that transaction is done, your risk is, is also uh done. So you have a native asset on the destination and, and that's it. But of course, it's up to dep developers to decide what architecture makes sense for them. Sometimes maybe a bridging bracketing solution makes sense. But the goal or the nicety of what the agent offers is, it gives you an option to just deal with native assets. All right, Brandon, thank you for joining the show this morning and we hope you have a great weekend. Thank you. You too. That was a chain head of product Brandon.