PayPal Ventures ( NASDAQ: PYPL ) and Galaxy Digital ( OTCPK:BRPHF ) are co-leading a $20M seed funding round for Chaos Labs, an automated economic security system for crypto protocols, the latter said Tuesday. The goal of the fundraise is for Chaos Labs, founded in October 2021, to expand its offerings and build out its suite of decentralized finance (DeFi)-focused risk and security products. Other high-profile investors participating in the round include Coinbase Global ( COIN ), Uniswap ( UNI-USD ) and Lightspeed. In its first year of operations, Chaos Labs had teamed up with a number of well-known DeFi participants, including Uniswap, to secure and optimize DeFi protocols against attacks (and verify its durability in any market condition) while offering recommendations on capital optimization. "As crypto development accelerates and the landscape grows in complexity, so does the range of potential exploits and hacks," said Amman Bhasin, partner at PayPal's venture capital arm. "Chaos Labs addresses this by arming protocols, investors, and users with a suite of risk management and optimization tools to protect against these vulnerabilities." In December 2022, PayPal Holdings ( PYPL ) integrated its crypto services with self-custodial crypto wallet MetaMask for ethereum transactions.
