Binance Labs announces strategic investment in Web3 infrastructure provider Ankr

Binance Labs, the venture capital arm of the crypto exchange Binance, that majorly focuses on equity & token investments in Web3 infrastructure, gaming & social platforms, has announced a strategic investment in Web3 infrastructure provider Ankr, well-known for introducing BNB Liquid Staking and building some of the BNB Chain’s core infrastructures, notably its Erigon upgrade.

Welcome @ankr to the #Binance Labs Family!

ICYMI — Ankr is a decentralized infrastructure and cross-chain staking DeFi platform that aims to make Web3 accessible for everyone.https://t.co/hvtYv43xGJ

— Binance Labs Fund (@BinanceLabs) August 11, 2022

The fund will primarily be used in ramping up the development process of Ankr’s remote procedure call (RPC) service and building out its Web3 developer suite, which includes the Multi-Chain Liquid Staking software development kit (SDK), Web3 Gaming SDK, and App Chains-as-a-Service.

Major contributions to BNB Chain

Previously, Ankr contributed open-source code to the BNB Chain and BNB Liquid Staking, helping strengthen BNB Chain’s  foundation. It  also implemented the Erigon and Archive Node upgrades, along with the most recent BNB Application Sidechain (BAS) scalability solution, to further boost the BNB ecosystem. Notably, the Erigon improvement decreased the amount of storage used by BNB Chain by 75%, improved RPC performance ten times, and sped up synchronization by 100 times.

Moreover, Ankr brings DeFi composability to BNB Liquid Staking, which marks another way to support the BNB Chain ecosystem. The co-founder of the company Ryan Fang expressed his excitement on the latest strategic investment and stated:

“We are committed to helping BNB Chain further scale, enhancing the BNB token utility, and expanding the Binance Application Sidechain (BAS) ecosystem.”

The company aims to “support not only innovative use cases that require a highly scalable infrastructure, but also infrastructure services that could contribute to building permissioned sidechains,” he added.

ANKR token shooting up

Though the specifics on the total amount invested remain undisclosed, the news has significantly increased the ANKR token’s value which is up by over 40% at the time of publication.

Recall that a few days back, Ankr launched new SDKs to allow developers to integrate liquid staking on their projects across multiple Proof-of-Stake chains.

On the other hand, as TheCoinRise reported in June, Binance Labs made a strategic investment in PancakeSwap, expanding its efforts in Web3 space.