Socket (previously known as Movr Network) has announced a $5 million seed round, led by Framework Ventures, an investment adviser with significant experience in decentralized finance (DeFi) space, and with participation from a group including Coinbase Ventures, Lightspeed, eGirl Capital, Nascent, Geometry, and entrepreneur Mark Cuban. The round will support Socket’s aim to unify the multichain ecosystem by connecting all chains and enabling seamless asset and data transfers between them.
Today, developers build protocol logic designed for one specific chain, yet deploy it across all chains throughout the ecosystem. This current development process leads to multiple, siloed application instances causing inefficiencies such as liquidity fragmentation and subpar user experiences.
Socket, which acts as a meta-layer that connects all chains, said it enables unified, multichain applications with shared liquidity and state across chains. Developers can plug into Socket’s meta-layer via easy-to-use APIs and build applications with interoperability as a core aspect of protocol logic.
The company currently supports asset transfers across chains via its liquidity layer, which aggregates all asset bridges into a single meta-bridge. Web3 discovery and collaboration app, Zapper; smart Web3 wallet, Zerion, and other apps are already seeing great success in utilizing Socket to offer multichain bridging for their growing user bases. Socket plans to release support for data transfers soon which will allow developers to build use cases like unified governance, chain-agnostic lending, and borrowing, NFT bridging, and multi-chain yield optimization.
“Cross-chain composability opens the door for broader adoption of Web3 and DeFi. Currently, users must knowingly engage with different instances of applications across chains, for example, Aave on Polygon or Aave on Ethereum,” said Rishabh Khurana, co-founder at Socket. “With Socket, users no longer need to pick and choose which chain to interact with, as our technology unites application liquidity and state across all chain instances, allowing users to focus on the application, in this case, Aave, itself.”
The company has also just launched its new app, Bungee, aiming to solve a frequent user need of moving tokens between chains easily. Leveraging the Socket Liquidity Layer, which bundles all bridges, DEXs, and DEX aggregators, Bungee will enable efficient and seamless cross-chain swaps for users.
“Over the recent months, the industry has experienced a massive shift in DeFi innovation to focus on building a multi-chain future for the Web3 ecosystem,” said Michael Anderson, co-founder of Framework Ventures. “Socket’s mission, in accompaniment with its partner applications, will greatly enhance interoperability within the DeFi space and hopefully draw a larger audience into the burgeoning world of decentralization and Web3.”