last week,Horizen Labs, Inc.last week,in a seed funding round led by Kenetic Capital, Digital Currency Group and Liberty City VenturesRaised $7 million. Other notable players are Sound Ventures, Deribit, Artist Capital, LionTree, and a hot new crypto opportunity fund called Deus. Thanks to the team for bringing together such great partners. You can read more about the round in the CoinDesk article, or at"Fortune Magazine"
Check out this article, in which I'll share some background and implications.In the crypto or blockchain world, whatever you want to call this new industry, it is exploding. no i'm not talking aboutrekt DeFi protocol
, I mean we have stumbled upon an important technology that promises to change our world. The problem is we don't yet know what all the implications are, we just know that something big is in the works.
Horizen Labs,Between borderless cryptocurrencies, privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, DeFi protocols, NFTs, and various other cross-industry experimenting dApps, we already know that there is a huge market value and a lagged explosion in end-user value (not just are speculators). The core value prop in all this crazy innovation is a technology that enables a decentralized and immutable (or, at least, expensive to change!) source of truth. What we do with that fact is the added value of this technology over traditional centralized systems.
We are a blockchain-first company, but at our core we build cryptographic circuits that enable a variety of data privacy and security applicationszero-knowledge proofzero-knowledge proof
(ZKP). This means we are a tools company that greatly facilitates vital blockchain infrastructure.
Blockchains are distributed databases that are open to the public to view every transaction. "Seeing every transaction" is not a good fit for most business models or a world against privacy violations (especially private data on user data and financial transactions).
This is all very abstract and can be applied to so many use cases, so let's motivate with an example. we recentlyandandLargest cryptocurrency p2p lenderCelsius Network Cooperation
A complete game-changer for the chain's automated audit tool, which builds cryptographic proofs of on-chain reserves in real-time, using ZKPs to protect the privacy of users and fund flows, while outputting exactly what everyone wants to know: Celsius actually controls what they claim reserves? This tool can and will be suitable for all kinds of audits and certifications including any digital asset on any popular blockchain, for anyone to use. Big auditing firms that think they are going to make a fortune in crypto should worry.HorizenIn this five-year journey of building encrypted organizations, we found that talent is the biggest bottleneck. launching
In the early days, we were starry-eyed crypto-anarchists who dreamed of changing the world through open source. Bitcoin is doing it, why can't we? Everything is decentralized, we have a super enthusiastic community, and we want developers to follow suit. Some did, but in the end a small group of amateurs with no resources and no clear distinction from other popular blockchain communities was enough to attract the right talent to innovate or deliver substance.Over time, Horizen passedfrom the block rewarddig out aresource pool
Putting that aside, I still think it's undervalued as a venture financing channel. The first few years are tough, but there is something magical about being persistent and persistent, and the consistent small gains really add up.
Fast forward to today. Over the past few years we have been building the organization and team, recruiting and training top talent (especially in the ZKP space), and inventing and building a great interoperability protocol to release in the coming months. With our sidechain mainnet launching soon, it’s time to significantly scale up the team and get ready for some massive ecosystem building. Specifically, it's time to get serious about scalable development tools and use cases. Horizen Labs raises $7 million to add critical firepower when it's needed most.
CEOs of most companies are notoriously overconfident, and personally, I've spent my life loathing unconditional certainty or bragging, but one thing I'm very confident about is the quality and organization of the team. Combining an elite team with incredible partners and mainstream capital capable of leading the world's hottest new industries together with a technology niche is a powerful force. That's what our investors are betting on.
