Arch Labs Raises $13M in Funding for Bitcoin-Based Smart Contracts

Bitcoin decentralized finance (DeFi) developer Arch Labs raised $13 million in funding toward building "ArchVM," which the developers say will provide smart-contract functionality on the original blockchain.

The funding round, which valued the company at $200 million, was led by Pantera Capital, according to an announcement on Tuesday.

Arch's plans to enable decentralized applications and protocols natively on Bitcoin.

ArchVM will handle off-chain computations to enable "Turing-complete smart contracts at the Bitcoin base layer" and provide Solana-like transaction speeds, Arch Labs said in the announcement.

The goal of introducing smart contracts to Bitcoin began to gather steam in October with the release of the BitVM computing language.

Numerous projects are now using BitVM as the basis for bringing smart contracts to Bitvcoin via layer-2 networks or bridges. Arch's aim is to avoid the need to bridge assets to layer-2s, which could present additional risks.