Binance Labs Makes Strategic Investment in Web3 Infrastructure Startup Ankr

Binance Labs, the venture capital and incubation arm of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, Binance has made a strategic investment into Ankr, one of the most innovative Web3.0 infrastructure service providers today.

Although the details of the injected investment were not revealed in the press release shared with Coinspeaker, the funding will go a long way in helping Ankr bolster its technology and infrastructure stack as the broader Web3.0 ecosystem grows bigger. As revealed, the investment will be deployed toward building out Ankr’s Web3 developer suite, including its Liquid Staking SDK, Web3 Gaming SDK, and App Chains As a Service.

From its current reach, the Ankr Protocol powers a minimum of over 7 billion blockchain requests per day across the 18 blockchain protocols it currently hosts RPCs for.

“We are very excited to count Binance Labs as a strategic investor. BNB Chain is by far the chain with the highest number of daily transactions and active users.” said Ryan Fang, the Chief Operating Officer at Ankr, “We are committed to support BNB Chain further scale, enhance BNB token utility by enabling DeFi composability using BNB Liquid Staking, and expand Binance Application Sidechain (BAS) ecosystem to enable innovative use cases requiring a highly scalable infrastructure, and other innovative infrastructure services opening the gates to permissioned sidechains.”

Supporting Ankr comes off as a very natural feat for Binance Labs as the infrastructure service provider has been an integral part of the BNB Chain ecosystem for some time now. The protocol has been making significant contributions to the BNB Liquid staking protocol and with its integration, all BNB Chain users can benefit from the faster and more efficient Layer-1 blockchain network that is being bootstrapped by the Ankr protocol.

The relevance of the Ankr protocol is evident as it makes using dApps, wallets, and crypto games possible by connecting them to the blockchains they need to communicate with.

More Direct Binance Labs and Ankr Relationship

As mentioned earlier, the Ankr protocol forms an integral part of the Binance Labs and the broader BNB Chain ecosystem. The startup was responsible for the building of BNB Chain’s Erigon upgrade Archive Node upgrade, and the latest BNB Application Sidechain (BAS) scalability solution.

These upgrades are not just rudimentary as they contribute significantly to the overall performance and strength of the BNB Chain blockchain. The Erigon upgrade for instance has helped reduce the storage requirement of the BNB Chain protocol by as much as 75% while increasing the RPC request performance by 10x.

The strategic investment into Ankr by Binance Labs comes off as one of the first moves from Yi He, the company’s co-founder who was appointed to lead the $7.5 billion venture early this month. Prior to the Ankr investment, Binance Labs has made a reputation for itself in the venture capital space and has backed other innovative projects including PancakeSwap while spearheading the $3 million investment from Magic Square back in July.