Union Labs has raised $4 million in seed funding to build what it describes as the first fully trustless bridge connecting appchains, layer 1, and layer 2 networks. The round included participation from Galileo, Semantic Ventures, Tioga Capital, Nascent, Lightshift, and Chorus One. The company is developing a zero-knowledge interoperability layer aimed at addressing security vulnerabilities in blockchain bridges. Bridge hacks resulted in over $1.6 billion in losses in 2022. Union Labs' solution uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify messages rather than granting special authority to relayers, which reduces private key vulnerability. The funding will support team expansion ahead of the mainnet launch. The team includes former leaders from Composable Finance, ConsenSys, Tokensoft, and Polygon.

Tenor, a non-custodial onchain lending platform for asset managers and large borrowers, has raised a seed round led by Variant. Nascent joined the round, with participation from Prelude, Very Early, and angel investors. Deal size and valuation were not disclosed. The platform targets institutional users seeking fixed-rate lending, aiming to bring portions of the $200 trillion global fixed-rate market onto stablecoin infrastructure. Tenor is built on Midnight, Morpho's fixed-rate lending primitive, and adds features including customisable markets, organisation accounts with permissions, and OTC matching. Tenor currently operates on Base, with additional blockchain deployments planned. The platform supports crypto-backed lending markets and plans to expand into foreign exchange and credit products.