Across, an interoperability startup and the co-creator of the ERC-7683 standard, has raised $41 million in a strategic token sale led by major venture capital firm Paradigm, saying it aims to unify the Ethereum ecosystem by fixing its long-standing fragmentation issue.
Per the press release shared with Cryptonews, the sale included the participation from Bain Capital Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, and Sina Habibian.
The startup closed a $10 million private token sale in 2022 to Hack VC, Placeholder, and Blockchain Capital. Therefore, this latest round has brought the project’s total funding to $51 million.
Meanwhile, Across says it connects Ethereum and Layer-2 networks in a matter of seconds. It supports Optimism, Base, Arbitrum, Linea, Scroll, zkSync, Polygon, and a number of other ecosystems. Additionally, it provides bridge integrations for decentralized apps (dapps), doing away with separate bridging.
The team notes that it will use this newly raised $41 million to boost product development and support Ethereum’s roll-up-centric roadmap.
Moreover, they’ll use the funding to increase the adoption of ERC-7683, backed by more than 50 protocols.
That said, the announcement highlights that Across has over $19 billion in total volume, recording $1 billion in January 2025.
Unlocking Intents-Based Tech
Besides working to unify Ethereum, Across aims to expand its intents-based technology. This tech allows users to perform cross-chain actions in seconds. Actually, the team puts it “at the heart of Across’ innovation.”
Intents-based technology enables users to specify what they want to do through a single transaction request. For example, they can choose to deposit tokens across chains, swap their coins, bridge funds, etc. Across takes over, automatically handles the asset bridging, and interacts with smart contracts – all “behind the scenes” so to abstract away the complexities and enable seamless crosschain interactions for users.
“Across pioneered intent-based interoperability and used it to build the leading bridge in crypto,” said Dan Robinson, General Partner at Paradigm.
According to Hart Lambur, co-founder of Risk Labs, the foundation behind the Across and UMA Protocols, Ethereum users need a fast and seamless experience that takes seconds not minutes. The next billion users won’t tolerate waiting, he said.
“The reality is that users today are juggling multiple chains and dealing with Ethereum’s fragmentation – this needs to change,” Lambur argued. “Ethereum must feel like a unified network, no matter how many chains are involved, and that has been our mission from the start.”
Notably, Across partnered with Uniswap Labs last year to co-author the ERC-7683 standard for crosschain intents on Ethereum. Thanks to this development, Web3 apps can express complex, multi-step crosschain transactions as a single request for a shared network of relayers to execute.
Over 50 protocols support this standard, including Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Optimism, with support from the Ethereum Foundation’s L2 Interop working group.
Meanwhile, in February 2025, Across announced that it would support crosschain transfer for Layer-2 Unichain’s public mainnet on day one, providing transfers between this chain and the Ethereum ecosystem.
The post Across Raises $41 Million in a Paradigm-Led Token Sale to Expand Intents-Based Tech appeared first on Cryptonews.
