In March, Aptos Labs announced a $200 million investment round, and now the company has confirmed that PayPal was one of the investors.
PayPal Ventures was one of the investors in Aptos Labs’ $200 million funding round confirmed in March, according to Coin Desk. Aptos Labs is bringing Facebook’s star-crossed Diem blockchain to life. PayPal Ventures’ first investment in a base layer product was made with this investment.
In a statement, PayPal Ventures investment partner Amman Bhasin stated, “We trust in the work that the Aptos Labs team is undertaking to establish a safe and scalable layer 1 blockchain.”
“The Aptos blockchain is constructed in such a way that it is both conducive to creating new rails and enticing to corporate clients and crypto-native developers, with the promise of greater dependability and security, faster transactions, and cheaper costs.”
PayPal (PYPL) was an early supporter of Libra, pledging at least $10 million to join the Libra Consortium. Following outrage on Capitol Hill, the corporation swiftly withdrew. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the Aptos funding round, which included Multi coin Capital, a16z alum Katie Haun, Three Arrows Capital, Para Fi Capital, and Coinbase Ventures, among others. The involvement of PayPal Ventures was not disclosed in the initial statement.
Aptos is composed of the Diem (previously Libra) blockchain’s original creators, researchers, designers, and constructors. The blockchain was announced as the backbone of a stablecoin project by Meta Platforms (previously Facebook) in 2019, but the project never got off the ground due to legal difficulties.
Meta announced the shutdown of Diem earlier this year, and Silver gate Bank purchased the technology and other assets. Much of the work done by Diem-affiliated teams, on the other hand, was done under open-source licenses, which means that the intellectual property is free to use.
Two months ago, Aptos’ developer test net became live. The main net is expected to be released in the third quarter.