Binance Labs makes strategic investment in Ankr

Binance Labs has made a strategic investment in decentralized infrastructure Web3 giant Ankr, which, in turn, strongly supports BNB Chain. 

Binance Labs and the strategic investment in Ankr

Ankr, the decentralized infrastructure Web3 giant, announced that it has secured a strategic investment from Binance Labs, the venture capital and accelerator arm of Binance. 

This is happening precisely because Binance has itself obtained significant open-source contributions from Ankr to the BNB Chain, BNB Liquid Staking, and its continued support of the ecosystem. 

Essentially, Ankr helps companies get their blockchains up and running faster, enabling them to offer users the best Web3 experiences. Launched in 2021, the Ankr protocol serves 200 billion RPC requests per month across 50 blockchain networks. 

In this regard, Ryan Fang, Chief Operating Officer of Ankr said:

“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”.

Moreover, Ankr is also the second largest node provider (only after Alchemy) and serves more than 7.2 billion blockchain requests per day on more than 30 blockchains.

Binance Labs and Ankr’s prospects

Ankr will use the proceeds to double its industry-leading RPC service and to develop its suite of Web3 developers, including Liquid Staking SDK, Web3 Gaming SDK, and App Chains As a Service. 

In addition, Ankr Protocol serves an average of more than 7 billion blockchain requests per day on the 18 blockchains for which it hosts RPC. 

Binance Labs’ support for Ankr also stems from the fact that all BNB Chain projects and users can benefit tremendously from the updates made by Ankr to the network. 

When one already considers that Ankr has built the core infrastructure of BNB Chain, including the Erigon upgrade, the Archive Node upgrade, and the latest BNB Application Sidechain (BAS) scalability solution, it is clear that the two platforms remain connected. 

Not only that, the Erigon upgrade reduced BNB Chain’s storage requirements by 75% and increased the performance of RPC requests by 10 times. 

The appointment of co-founder Yi He as the new manager

Binance recently also announced that co-founder Yi He has been appointed as the new head of the venture capital (VC) arm of the Binance Labs incubator. 

Yi He will lead both the overall strategy and day-to-day operations of Binance Labs, and, part of her efforts will be aimed at supporting infrastructure projects and improving the utilities of innovative crypto and blockchain projects. 

The choice of Yi He was also commented on by Binance CEO CZ Zhao, who confirms Yi’s active involvement in the Labs since their inception, emphasizing her experience and her key role in identifying projects which are still in their early stages.