Coinbase, Framework Venture Funds Invest $5M in Socket Protocol, in Bet on Blockchain Interoperability

Socket, a protocol aimed at enhancing communication between blockchains, has raised $5 million from the crypto-friendly venture-capital funds Coinbase Ventures and Framework Ventures.

The new capital will expand Socket’s work with Coinbase, including providing bridging opportunities for developers and users of Coinbase Wallet and Base, the company’s new layer-2 network atop Ethereum.

With new layer-2 networks or “rollups” coming to market and more layer-1 blockchains going live, Socket sees itself as an important player in connecting these fragmented ecosystems, allowing chains to communicate with each other, according to the team. By providing a method to bridge assets, users are able to transact easier across multiple networks, theoretically making the experience feel like operating on one blockchain.

The fundraise comes as interoperability solutions, such as LayerZero, have garnered the attention of investors, who view bridging as an important feature for the future of blockchains. Last week, the inter-bank messaging system Swift disclosed it had conducted experiments to transfer tokenized value across multiple private and public blockchains, involving Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol.

“For us, to have this scalable future, rollup-to-rollup communication is really important,” said Vaibhav Chellani, the co-founder of Socket. “I think the scaling future, and the multi- or cross-chain future are the same thing.”

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Margaux Nijkerk reports on the Ethereum protocol and L2s. A graduate of Johns Hopkins and Emory universities, she has a masters in International Affairs & Economics. She holds a small amount of ETH and other altcoins.

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