Lightning Labs yesterday announced it had raised $70 million in a series B funding round to accelerate its development of open-source Bitcoin and Lightning software.
The firm revealed in its official statement that it intends to utilise the round’s earnings to fund its efforts in building Bitcoin and Lightning software, including Taro which is a protocol to bring assets to the Bitcoin stack through Taproot.
The firm reveals in the statement that Taro helps in sending stablecoins through the bitcoin network with the instant, high volume, low fee nature of Lightning Network, and fees far lower than Visa.
Lightning Labs co-founder and CEO Elizabeth Stark said, “In a world with a lot of technology solutions in the search of a problem, we believe in solving real problems for real people, which is what sets the entire Lightning Network protocol community apart.”
Taro aims to bring interoperability between assets like USD stablecoins and Bitcoin across emerging markets, (especially El Salvador which has already adopted bitcoin as a legal tender) and video games, major exchanges, tipping on Twitter, and more.
The Series B funding round of Lightning Labs’ was led by Valor Equity Partners, early supporters of Tesla and SpaceX. Another prominent investor in the round is global asset manager Baillie Gifford.
Others participating in the round were Goldcrest Capital, Kingsway, Bitcoin-only venture capitalist firm Stillmark, NYDIG, Moore Strategic Ventures, Brevan Howard, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, Silvergate CEO Alan Lane.
Lightning Labs had raised $10 million in a series A round two years ago, when it had also released its Lightning Loop service in beta.
