Wormhole garners whopping $2.5B valuation as new unit emerges

Cross-chain protocol’s product development-focused unit Wormhole Labs formally launches following $225 million raise

article-image

Wormhole and Adobe Express modified by Blockworks

share

Cross-chain protocol Wormhole has formally launched a product development-focused unit in tandem with a $225 million fundraise.  

The raise gives the interoperability platform a $2.5 billion valuation, the company said in a Wednesday announcement.   

Wormhole is backed by investors including Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Jump Trading, ParaFi, Dialectic, Borderless Capital and Arrington Capital. It was not immediately clear which investors participated in the latest round. 

“We’re laser-focused on bringing solutions to market that solve real problems for our customers and end-users, and are on a mission to enable real-world impact from the Web3 space,” Wormhole Foundation Chief Commercial Officer Robinson Burkey said in a statement. 

The Wormhole Foundation also revealed the formal launch of Wormhole Labs Wednesday — an independent tech company to be led by Saeed Badreg. The executive’s LinkedIn page says he has been working as Wormhole Labs’ CEO since August.

Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Badreg, along with fellow Wormhole executive — Chief Operating Officer Anthony Ramirez — had split from Jump Crypto to run the protocol as an independent entity.  

Since launching in 2021, Wormhole has transferred roughly $35 billion in value. It routinely processes 2 million cross-chain messages across 30-plus chains daily, according to the company. 

The protocol was hacked for roughly $320 million last year — at which time Jump Trading crypto arm Jump Crypto stepped in to replace the funds.

Badreg said in a statement that Wormhole was founded with the vision of a world in which large companies increasingly use public and private blockchains. Such a transformation has started to take shape via the tokenization of real-world assets, for example — or as blockchains are used for other use cases to boost efficiency and lower costs.

Read more: JPMorgan adds ‘holy grail’ payments feature as part of blockchain push

Badreg added: “We reaffirmed our commitment to this vision by launching Wormhole Labs, dedicated to advancing the technology that makes efficient blockchain-to-blockchain communication possible.”


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template (10).png

Research

Innovations on Aptos’ technical design through Raptr, Shardines, and Zaptos approach near-optimal latency and throughput by unlocking 100% utilization of network resources, with the capacity to settle 260k transactions per second with latencies less than 800ms. The original Move language was revamped with the launch of Move 2, supporting more expressivity in smart contract logic and a scalable ability to interact with high volume datasets. The ecosystem has benefitted from strong asset inflows, now hosting over $1.3B in stablecoins, $450M in bridged BTC, and $530M in RWAs. Activity in the Aptos ecosystem has grown notably over the past year, with monthly application revenue reaching ~$835k and monthly DEX volumes growing to over $5B, both at new all time highs.

article-image

Also, only three tokens have outperformed bitcoin so far this year: XMR, HYPE and SKY

article-image

The fund group has submitted proposals in recent months for other funds that would hold litecoin, solana, XRP, HBAR, Sui and others

article-image

Momentum’s back — BTC leads, risk assets follow

article-image

Ondo Finance’s acquisition of blockchain development company Strangelove follows its buy of Oasis Pro

article-image

Cryptocurrency and stock traders alike had a lot to unpack Wednesday

article-image

The government says Storm was a money-hungry aid to criminals; the defense says it’s not his fault that people used his code for illicit activities.