Cata Labs announced that it has raised $4.2 million in seed funding to support its development of a cross-chain liquidity layer to accelerate the economic activity between blockchains. And Spartan Group led the round, with participation from Robot Ventures, Maven11, Alchemy Ventures, HashKey Capital, Circle Ventures, Superscrypt, and others. And notable angel investors include Calvin Liu, Aditi Sriram, and David Phelps.
Launched by crypto veterans Jim Chang and Alexander Lindgren, Cata Labs is building Catalyst, an open-source protocol that provides liquidity between modular blockchains. And with Catalyst, any new modular chain can automatically connect liquidity and swap with any chain – including liquidity hubs like Ethereum and Cosmos.
Modular blockchains – which are a new concept in crypto – are made up of different modules that can be added as needed. And each module performs a specific function, making the blockchain more flexible and adaptable. Modular blockchains are able to help increase the scalability and customization of blockchain networks.
Plus modular blockchains are easier to deploy than traditional blockchains, enabling an explosion in the number of blockchains. And as new chains continue to launch, they remain siloed, hindering trade between them. There’s not much to do for a modular chain if it cannot connect to another blockchain. The Catalyst protocol is changing this, offering an automatic cross-chain connection for modular chains at launch – dissolving the barriers between chains as the global liquidity layer.
Over the next few months, Cata Labs is going to focus on the release of the Catalyst whitepaper and testnet, bringing the power of permissionless liquidity to the Cosmos ecosystem. And shortly after, Catalyst will expand to the Ethereum ecosystem, servicing alternative L1 blockchains and L2 rollups.
KEY QUOTES:
“The modular blockchain thesis makes it easier to create a lightweight and configurable blockchain, which leads to a proliferation of new chains. In this world, we need to build scalable infrastructure that allows for these chains to connect and transfer value between one another. Catalyst is built from the ground up with that intention in mind: connecting the modular future easily and automatically. It’s an evolution of the DeFi primitives that came before it.”
— Alexander Lindgren, Co-Founder of Cata Labs
“With the proliferation of rollups and app-specific chains, liquidity fragmentation is becoming a significant pain point and we have yet to see a unified liquidity layer that allows users to trade native assets seamlessly and efficiently cross-chain. Catalyst presents a fresh approach to this problem space with its trust-minimized design and its ‘unit of liquidity’ value abstraction. We believe Catalyst is in a great to position to solve this pain point, and we are very excited to be backing Jim and Alexander on their vision of bringing native swaps to and being the go-to liquidity layer for these rollups and app-specific chains.”
— Kelvin Koh, managing director of the Spartan Group
“Maven 11 has been the earliest backer of the modular blockchain design. As such we are extremely proud to be backing Jim and Alexander as they build out the first purposefully designed cross-domain application. We envision a world with 1000s of rollups and app-specific chains and Catalyst is perfectly positioned to capture the increased cross-chain liquidity demand for this.”
— Mads, Researcher at Maven 11
“Modular blockchains have introduced a ton of new design space for developers, empowering them with untapped levels of flexibility. This will inevitably accelerate the creation of more applications, and to support this growth, new connectivity infrastructure will be necessary for permissionless value transfer between those chains. Catalyst is purpose-built for this modular future, streamlining and abstracting the complexity of cross-chain transactions.”
— Paul Almasi, Head of Alchemy Ventures
