Binance Labs, VC and accelerator branch of Binance, has made a strategic investment in Ankr, a leading provider of Web3 infrastructure. The strategic funding from Binance Labs comes after Ankr’s significant open-source contributions to BNB Chain, BNB Liquid Staking, and the ecosystem as a whole.
What the Binance Labs investment brings to Ankr
More than 100 projects from over 25 countries have benefited from funding and incubation programs through Binance Labs. Providing funding for industry projects that contribute to the expansion of the blockchain ecosystem as a whole helps identify promising blockchain entrepreneurs, startups, and communities and empowers them to succeed.
Ankr plans to invest the funds towards expanding its Web3 developer suite and improving its market-leading RPC service. More specifically, Ankr will expand its Liquid Staking Software Development Kit (SDK), Web3 Gaming SDK, and App Chains. As part of the agreement, Ankr has committed to assisting BNB Chain in further scaling, enhancing the utility of BNB tokens. It will do this by enabling DeFi composability through the use of BNB Liquid Staking, and growing the Binance Application Sidechain (BAS) ecosystem.
When combined with staked BNB, Ankr’s BNB Liquid Staking makes the BNB Chain ecosystem more robust by adding DeFi compatibility. With the introduction of Liquid Staking, BNB token holders now have multiple avenues to profit from their holdings in DeFi. They are not limited to just one strategy but are free to employ multiple at once, such as staking, farming, lending and more.
Ankr is a service that operates in the background to facilitate the use of dApps, wallets, and crypto games by linking them to the blockchains they require. Ankr developed the foundational elements of the BNB Chain, such as the upgraded Erigon and Archive Nodes and the most recent iteration of the scalable BNB Application Sidechain (BAS). The Erigon enhancement reduced the needed storage space by half and multiplied the speed of RPC requests by ten.