Cata Labs, a blockchain infrastructure startup, has raised $4.2 million in seed funding at a “mid-eight-figure valuation,” the company announced Wednesday.

The fundraising round that closed in March was led by crypto venture capital firm Spartan Group and included participation from Robot Ventures, Maven 11, Alchemy Ventures, HashKey Capital, Circle Ventures and Superscrypt, among others .

Cata Labs is building Catalyst, a cross-chain bridge that aims to make it easier for blockchains to communicate with each other. Currently, popular layer 1 blockchains like Ethereum and Solana cannot easily transact with other blockchains, creating a breakthrough in bridging projects like Jump Capital-backed Wormhole and Andreessen Horowitz-backed LayerZero .

“Creating new blockchains has become stupidly easy,” said Jim Chang, co-founder of Cata. There are ways you can just click a button and create a new blockchain, but it doesn't make sense to have all these blockchains and they can't communicate with each other.”

Chang, who was previously chief product officer at decentralized finance protocol Aave, is teaming up with Cata co-founder Alexander Lindgren to launch Catalyst.

Catalyst differs from existing bridges on its platform that can be pre-integrated into blockchains that have chosen to participate in Catalyst's ecosystem, forgoing the manual and labor-intensive integration process. of bridges like Wormhole.

Catalyst's thesis is that the future will contain thousands of modular blockchains that need to communicate with each other, modular blockchains are easier to deploy than traditional blockchains, and split the core functions of blockchain into a number of different specialized blockchains. .

“With the rise of pooling and application-specific chains, liquidity fragmentation is becoming a significant pain point and we are yet to see a liquidity layer,” said Kelvin Koh, manager. What unification allows users to seamlessly and efficiently trade native assets across the cross-chain.” Director of Spartan Corporation. “We believe Catalyst is in a great position to solve this pain point.”

However, a major challenge for the modularity thesis is attracting user activity on its blockchains. “Ultimately, all these bridges jump into a race to take it all and to build network effects,” Chang said.