From cross-chain bridge aggregation to general liquidity markets, LI.FI received another $29 million in funding.

Why is a cross-chain infrastructure that has been hacked twice receiving another round of capital investment?

Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

Cross-chain infrastructure startup LI.FI has received another round of capital investment.

Berlin-based cross-chain liquidity aggregation protocol announced the completion of a new $29 million funding round, led by crypto venture capital firms Multicoin Capital and CoinFund. This round is an additional investment in the company's Series A round in 2023, bringing the company's total funding to approximately $51.7 million.

According to official disclosures, LI.FI currently has over 100 employees, with a lifetime trading volume exceeding $60 billion. Its October trading volume reached $8 billion, a 595% increase from $1.15 billion a year ago. It has nearly 1,000 B2B partners, including major financial and Web3 applications such as Robinhood, Binance, Kraken, MetaMask, Phantom, Ledger, Hyperliquid, Circle, and Alipay.

In a crypto market where people are wary of "cross-chain bridge security," why would investors be willing to inject $29 million into a cross-chain liquidity project?

Financing and Team

In an interview with Fortune, LI.FI co-founder and CEO Philipp Zentner likened the company's positioning to "a combination of Google Flights and Google Maps": helping businesses compare exchange rates and bridging fees between different chains while finding the most cost-effective and efficient cross-chain path for every transaction.

According to his LinkedIn profile, LI.FI's founder and CEO is Philipp Zentner. Zentner previously founded the information analytics company STOMT in September 2012, serving as its CEO. STOMT helped brands collect and manage qualitative feedback at scale through standardized communication, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP). Following this, Zentner began working on Web3 projects in 2021, serving as a co-founder of the NFT project CryptoPixels and the Tezos-based DeFi project Freibier.io. He officially founded LI.FI in May 2021.

LI.FI's co-founder and CTO is Max Klenk, who was previously the co-founder and CTO of STOMT. He holds a Master of Science degree from the Hasso-Plattner Institute in Germany, majoring in systems engineering.

In terms of funding timeline, LI.FI completed a $5.5 million strategic round of financing in July 2022, led by crypto-native fund 1kx, with participation from Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and others. In March 2023, it completed a $17.5 million Series A round, co-led by CoinFund and Singapore's Superscrypt, with participation from Bloccelerate, L1 Digital, Circle, Factor, Perridon, Theta Capital, Three Point Capital, Abra, and nearly 20 angel investors. This latest $29 million Series A extension brings the total funding to approximately $51.7 million.

The new round of funding will primarily be used to drive further expansion of the company's business and the development of new products, including the development of infrastructure for AI agents and stablecoins, as well as an open intent and solver market planned for launch in the first quarter of 2026 to expand access to third-party liquidity.

It's worth noting that, according to Fortune's report, LI.FI has already achieved self-sufficiency in terms of profitability, with its revenue primarily coming from transaction fee sharing with B2B clients, although the company declined to disclose specific revenue figures. As of October, the company's monthly trading volume was approximately seven times that of the same period last year. This round of financing seems more like an effort to accelerate product line expansion and market share gains than a means of survival.

From cross-chain bridge aggregation to a "universal liquidity market"

Traditional financial institutions, internet finance applications, and mainstream crypto companies that want to integrate multi-chain asset trading and cross-chain transfers into their products need to connect to different chain bridging protocols, DEXs, and aggregators themselves, and also need to continuously maintain and monitor security risks. This is both expensive and something most teams lack the experience for.

What LI.FI does is "abstract" this layer of complexity:

1. Protocol layer: Aggregates cross-chain bridges, DEXs, and DEX aggregators on dozens of public chains, making cross-chain transactions of "any asset to any asset" possible.
2. Developer tools: Provided to B2B clients such as wallets, trading platforms, and Neo-bank through APIs/SDKs/widgets, offering a single interface to solve "multi-chain pricing + path planning + execution".
3. Front-end product: Jumper.Exchange, which is operated in-house, is a cross-chain aggregation interface for end users.

If the early LI.FI was more like a "cross-chain bridge + DEX aggregator", solving the problem of "how to find the optimal exchange path among dozens of chains", then starting in 2025, LI.FI clearly put forward a more ambitious narrative: to build a "universal liquidity market" that covers all chains.

In its LI.FI 2.0 release in early 2025, the company pointed out that as the number of public chains, rollups, and application chains has shifted from linear expansion to exponential growth, the traditional aggregation model that relies solely on connecting cross-chain bridges and DEXs is no longer sufficient to support the interoperability needs of the entire multi-chain ecosystem.

LI.FI 2.0 has upgraded its original cross-chain aggregator into a universal liquidity infrastructure "from user intent to cross-chain execution" by acquiring the intents protocol Catalyst, developing its own solver/bridge Pioneer, and collaborating with the cross-chain token aggregation layer Glacis. It aims to enable any chain to have interoperability from day one, while providing a unified liquidity routing and settlement layer for thousands of chains and millions of assets.

How can a cross-chain infrastructure that has been hacked twice be considered secure?

When discussing cross-chain technology, security issues are unavoidable. In recent years, cross-chain bridges have practically become "hackers' cash cows," with attacks ranging from Nomad to Wormhole involving hundreds of millions of dollars. According to the SlowMist hacker archive, there have been as many as 51 security incidents related to cross-chain bridges, resulting in over $1.79 billion in economic losses.

LI.FI itself is not "accident-free":

• In March 2022, a vulnerability was discovered in one of its early smart contracts, allowing attackers to steal approximately $600,000 from 29 wallets through malicious calls to the contract. The company subsequently released a detailed technical analysis and stated that it would use its own funds to cover the losses of affected users.
• July 2024: Following a contract upgrade, the newly added contract module again exposed a vulnerability that allowed malicious calls to users with infinite approval, resulting in the theft of approximately $10 million to $11.6 million in assets. LI.FI quickly shut down the affected contracts after the incident and released an incident report explaining the specific cause and the fix.

According to the review by the external security team, both attacks were related to "arbitrary access to any contract," essentially sacrificing some security boundaries in order to increase flexibility.

For a protocol positioned as a "general liquidity infrastructure," such a security incident is undoubtedly a serious warning. On the one hand, LI.FI's aggregation model means that if something goes wrong, it will affect the entire B2B customer chain; on the other hand, cross-chain bridges and liquidity aggregation are themselves among the most complex infrastructures in terms of attack surface, making it difficult to maintain high flexibility while achieving absolute security.

Seizing "routing rights" in a fragmented, multi-chain world

If we had to summarize LI.FI's current positioning in one sentence, it would be this: attempting to seize the discourse power of "liquidity routing and price discovery" in a highly fragmented multi-chain world.

Will the $29 million in new funding bring LI.FI closer to its vision of a "universal liquidity market"? The answer depends on three variables: whether security governance can withstand the next black swan event, whether intents and chain abstraction can truly achieve large-scale application, and the final regulatory focus in the multi-chain DeFi field.

For readers interested in cross-chain infrastructure and the DeFi sector, LI.FI's latest funding round sends at least one signal: at the infrastructure level, capital remains willing to bet on a "multi-chain future," but the way it's betting has shifted from "single cross-chain bridges" to higher-level aggregation and abstraction.

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