Since Bitcoin’s whitepaper was published, bold entrepreneurs have pursued a way to revolutionize money with three fundamental goals: make it globally accessible, frictionless to transmit, and free of gatekeepers.

But banks continue to stifle advancements, keeping payment rails fragmented, slow, and expensive.

In response, blockchains have innovated where TradFi can’t and proven themselves to be the next evolutionary leap in payments infrastructure.

Payment volumes have already surged on blockchains thanks to the proliferation of stablecoins and a worldwide desire for 24/7, 365 accessibility. But crypto faces a paradox. While many blockchains have solved traditional payments' speed and cost problems, and specialized even further in order to support thousands of currencies, native assets, and applications, the crypto ecosystem has reintroduced that old issue of fragmentation in the process.

Users are siloed once again. 

And this undermines both crypto’s original unifying nature as well as the UX that mainstream commerce demands. Bridges have served as an adequate temporary fix but are designed in a one-dimensional manner. A world of many siloes and many bridges is still cumbersome to travel through.

Relay is entirely focused on solving this fragmentation problem, and has established itself as the definitive payments infrastructure for digital assets.

To date, Relay has facilitated $20B+ in volume across 100M+ transactions, and applications using Relay were amongst the largest source of onchain transactions in the world last year. They have introduced enterprise-grade payment infrastructure that unifies the entire onchain economy while rivaling modern payment systems in reliability and efficiency.

As interoperability infrastructure for crosschain payments built on a network uniquely designed to solve the coordination problem of onchain commerce, Relay enables instant value transfer across 85+ blockchains through a single integration. Their vast partnerships continue to drive network effects around the largest payment flows in the onchain economy.

Users can hold assets anywhere they want and pay however they want, while a single integration allows applications to accept payments from any user, on any chain, in any currency.

The team is now focused on deploying the next evolution of the Relay Protocol with the launch of Relay Chain, a specialized network optimized for high throughput payment coordination across chains. With this piece of the puzzle in place, Relay will enable crypto to fulfill the vision Satoshi had for a P2P electronic cash system almost two decades ago. Borderless, unmediated, and lightning fast to boot.

After leading Relay’s Seed and doubling down in their Series A, we’re thrilled to co-lead Relay’s $17M Series B alongside Union Square Ventures and further fuel their growth into a foundational layer of the onchain economy.

—

Relay App: https://relay.link/bridge 

Relay on X: https://x.com/RelayProtocol 

Peter Watts - Founder & CEO: https://x.com/ptrwtts 

Jason Maier - Founder & COO: https://x.com/_jasonmaier 

Michael Morrissey - Founder & CPO: https://x.com/mmorrissey0