PayPal Ventures Invested in Team Reviving Diem Blockchain

Aptos Labs, a team bringing Facebook’s star-crossed Diem blockchain to life, told CoinDesk that PayPal Ventures was one of the investors in a $200 million funding round confirmed in March. The investment was PayPal Ventures’ first in a base layer project.

“We believe in the work that the Aptos Labs team is doing to build a safe and scalable layer 1 blockchain,” PayPal Ventures Investment Partner Amman Bhasin said in a statement. “With the promise of improved reliability and security, faster transactions, and lower fees, the Aptos blockchain is designed in a way that makes it both conducive to building new rails and compelling to corporate clients and crypto-native developers.”

Notably, PayPal (PYPL) was involved in the initial launch of Libra, committing at least $10 million to become a member of the Libra Consortium. The company quickly pulled out following backlash on Capitol Hill.

The Aptos funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with participation from Multicoin Capital, a16z alum Katie Haun, Three Arrows Capital, ParaFi Capital and Coinbase Ventures, among others. PayPal Ventures’ participation wasn’t revealed with the initial announcement.

Read more: Team Bringing Diem Blockchain to Life Confirms $200M Raise, Says Coinbase and More Are Building on Devnet

The Aptos team is made up of the original creators, researchers, designers and builders of the Diem (formerly Libra) blockchain. Meta (formerly Facebook) announced the blockchain as the backbone of a stablecoin project in 2019 but never made it out of the gate due to regulatory hurdles.

Earlier this year, Meta confirmed the shutdown of Diem and sold the technology and other assets to Silvergate Bank. However, much of the work done by Deim-affiliated teams was placed under open-source licenses, meaning the intellectual property is fair game. Aptos is led by Avery Ching and Mo Shaikh. Ching co-created the Diem blockchain’s DiemBFT consensus protocol, which Aptos is using.

Aptos’ developer testnet launched two months ago. The firm expects the mainnet launch to happen during the third quarter.