An under-the-radar altcoin witnessed a mild jump in price on Thursday after the venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) announced it was investing $55 million in the token.

Ali Yahya, a general partner at a16z crypto, announced the investment in ZRO, the native token of the omnichain interoperability protocol LayerZero.

LayerZero aims to move data across blockchains and support “censorship-resistant messages and permissionless development through immutable smart contracts.” Yahya notes the a16z investment has a three-year lockup.

ZRO was trading around $2.33 prior to the announcement and surged to a high of $2.54 around 90 minutes later. The 208th-ranked crypto asset by market cap has since partially retraced to $2.46 at time of writing, though it remains up by more than 2.5% in the past 24 hours.

The overall crypto market cap, by comparison, is down more than 1% in the past day.

Earlier this week, the on-chain perpetual exchange GMX announced LayerZero would serve as the “preferred messaging infrastructure provider” for its multichain expansion. The XDC Network, a layer-1 blockchain, also recently announced a LayerZero omnichain integration.

Explains XDC,

“This integration connects the XDC Network to over 125+ LayerZero-supported blockchains, empowering developers and enterprises to build omnichain applications interacting across networks with enhanced trust, speed, and efficiency.”

Generated Image: Midjourney