Arclabs, which develops a bitcoin-native layer-2 solution, raised $5.2 million in seed funding to expand programmable financial applications based on bitcoin (BTC), The Block reported on March 12.

Tether participated in the funding round.

Founded in 2024, Arclabs has raised more than $7.7 million in institutional funding, including this investment.

Arclabs plans to use the funds to expand its team, strengthen developer relations, and expand product development and partnerships. CEO Marco Argentieri (마르코 아르젠티에리) said, "We plan to build tools that integrate stablecoins and bitcoin liquidity at scale."

Arcade supports off-chain real-time trading and complex financial applications, and provides scalability without changing bitcoin consensus rules, The Block reported.

Arcade assets are designed to use a VTXO (Virtual Transaction Outputs) structure to issue, transfer and burn stablecoins and tokens off-chain. This enables asset movement without affecting the bitcoin blockchain, while supply adjustments are automated through a "control asset" mechanism. Even if an Arcade operator goes offline, assets can be protected on-chain using OP_RETURN metadata.