The New Era of Cross-Chain: How LI.FI, which raised $29 million, is reshaping multi-chain liquidity?

Every significant capital injection is a collective vote of confidence in the potential of the industry. On December 11, 2025, Berlin-based cross-chain infrastructure protocol LI.FI announced the completion of a $29 million Series A extension funding round, led by top crypto venture capital firms Multicoin Capital and CoinFund.

This marks another major capital infusion since LI.FI’s Series A funding in 2023, bringing its total funding to approximately $51.7 million. Against the backdrop of frequent cross-chain bridge security incidents, this financing not only provides LI.FI with ammunition but also serves as a statement from the capital markets.

01 Funding Overview: Why Are Capitalists Betting on a “Previously Attacked” Protocol?

According to official disclosures, after this round of financing, LI.FI’s total funding reached about $52 million. The funds will be used for business expansion and new product development, including the development of AI agents and stablecoin infrastructure, with plans to launch an open intent and solver marketplace in Q1 2026.

The backing of capital is supported by solid business data. LI.FI currently employs over 100 staff members, with a total lifetime transaction volume exceeding $60 billion, and in October 2025 alone, monthly transaction volume hit $8 billion.

This figure is roughly seven times the volume from the same period last year, demonstrating explosive growth in business.

02 Business Evolution: From Bridge Aggregation to a Universal Liquidity Marketplace

LI.FI’s positioning has evolved significantly. Initially, it was mainly a “cross-chain bridge + DEX aggregator,” primarily solving the problem of “finding the optimal swap path between dozens of chains.”

Traditional financial institutions or Web3 applications wanting to integrate multi-chain asset trading need to connect to different bridging protocols, DEXs, and aggregators across chains, a process that is costly and technically challenging.

LI.FI’s value lies in completely “abstracting” this complexity. By aggregating cross-chain bridges and DEXs across dozens of public chains at the protocol layer, and exposing a unified API, SDK, or widget to B2B clients, it makes “any asset to any asset” cross-chain trading possible.

Today, LI.FI has proposed a more ambitious vision: building a “general liquidity market” that covers all chains.

In LI.FI 2.0, released in early 2025, the company noted that with the exponential growth in public chains, Rollups, and application chains, the traditional model of merely aggregating cross-chain bridges and DEXs is no longer sufficient to support the interoperability needs of the multi-chain ecosystem.

03 Competitive Landscape: Competing for “Routing Rights” in a Fragmented World

Competition in the cross-chain infrastructure space is intensifying. Currently, various protocols adopt different architectures to address similar challenges, with LI.FI occupying a unique position through its comprehensive liquidity aggregation model.

Unlike 1inch, which focuses on single-chain exchange aggregation, and Symbiosis, which concentrates on native cross-chain liquidity solutions, LI.FI’s core advantage lies in its “aggregation model” that delivers powerful network effects.

The more bridging protocols and liquidity sources integrated into its system, the higher the routing optimization value it can provide to users. This structural advantage grows as the protocol accumulates more transaction data, creating higher barriers for new entrants.

For ordinary traders, this means that when seeking multi-chain token exposure on platforms like Gate.io, they can rely more on such efficient infrastructure to easily access liquidity off the main chains.

04 Security Challenges: Lessons from Incidents and Paths for Improvement

Security is an unavoidable topic when discussing cross-chain. According to SlowMist’s hacker incident database, there have been 51 security events related to cross-chain bridges, resulting in over $1.79 billion in economic losses.

LI.FI itself has experienced incidents. In March 2022 and July 2024, its smart contracts were attacked twice due to vulnerabilities, causing asset losses of approximately $600,000 and between $10 million to $11.6 million respectively.

External security reviews indicate both attacks were related to “arbitrary contract call permissions,” essentially sacrificing some security boundaries for greater flexibility.

For a protocol positioned as “general liquidity infrastructure,” these incidents are serious warnings. On one hand, LI.FI’s aggregation model means that once compromised, the impact can affect the entire B2B client chain; on the other hand, cross-chain bridges and liquidity aggregation are among the most complex attack surfaces in infrastructure.

05 Market Impact: Why Cross-Chain Interoperability Will Be the Core Battlefield in 2025

Cross-chain interoperability has become a fundamental challenge in this cycle of blockchain development.

Unlike previous focuses on scalability or throughput, today, Layer 1 and Layer 2 solutions like Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, and Base are quite mature. Capital and liquidity are dispersed across multiple ecosystems, and the market’s demand for efficient capital flow infrastructure is increasing.

Spencer Applebaum, investment partner at Multicoin Capital, stated in a release: “As cryptocurrency trading becomes a core feature of mainstream fintech applications, the most difficult problem is… enabling fragmented blockchains, liquidity, and execution to work seamlessly together.”

This $29 million funding round clearly indicates that venture capitalists now see blockchain interoperability infrastructure as a key area for future competition. The technical complexity creates high barriers, protecting mature protocols like LI.FI from common competition, while each cross-chain security incident actually increases market demand for reliable, well-funded infrastructure.

Future Outlook

As of December 12, 2025, LI.FI’s partner list has grown to nearly 1,000, including industry giants such as Robinhood, Binance, Kraken, MetaMask, Phantom, and Ledger.

With new capital in place, LI.FI plans to expand into perpetual futures, yield opportunities, prediction markets, and lending markets. Philipp Zentner mentioned that besides business expansion, he also plans to hire more staff with the new capital.

When asked about the company’s valuation, the co-founder and CEO chose to remain silent but confirmed that LI.FI is already profitable, mainly earning revenue from transaction fee splits. In the highly uncertain crypto market, projects that can be self-sustaining and continue to attract capital may be the key pillars for building a multi-chain future.