Arch Labs has secured a $7 million investment to develop a native application platform for Bitcoin.
The seed funding round was led by Multicoin Capital along with other participants and collaborators, including Portal Ventures, OKX Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, CMS Holdings, Tangent, Cypher and Newman Capital.
The company planned to use the fund to support the development of Arch ‘s decentralized finance (DeFi) application directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, bypassing the need for add-on layers or bridges.
Relying on secondary layers often complicates the user experience and jeopardizes the inherent security benefits of operating directly on the Bitcoin network.
“Ordinary numbers marked a fundamental change in Bitcoin’s evolution. It signaled the beginning of a new era where Bitcoin can serve as more than just a payment ledger,” said Arch co-founder and CEO Matt Mudano.
“This moment paved the way for Arch,” Mudano stated. “We are leveraging Bitcoin’s unparalleled security and liquidity to unlock a whole new ecosystem of applications on the world’s more secure and liquid blockchain.”
The funds were raised primarily to expand the platform’ s development team. By hiring additional skilled developers, Arch Labs aims to accelerate the creation and improvement of decentralized applications.
Arch features and deployment plan
Arch is a parallelized proof-of-stake platform that includes a Rust-based zkVM, known as ArchVM, and a decentralized network of verifiers that create an untrusted execution environment on the blockchain.
“We have evaluated several Bitcoin Layer 2 and all of them offer the same set of compromises that sacrifice security in exchange for speed,” said Vishal Kankani, chief investment officer at Multicoin Capital.
“Arch is definitely not Layer 2 in the sense that eager users don’t have to link resources to some untrusted chain to use it,” – Kankani said.
In addition to expanding its team, Arch Labs plans to launch a public development network (devnet), followed by a major software release scheduled for the second half of the year. This progress will allow early testers and future users to explore the platform’s capabilities, improving stability and functionality before a full-scale public deployment.
