ZK Proof Secures $15M Seed Fund.

R

adisav Cojbasic, Founder and CEO of Ulvetanna—a zero-knowledge-proof (ZKP) hardware firm—announced that the startup has secured a seed round worth $15 million with leading investors Bain Capital Crypto, Paradigm, and Jump Crypto. The recent funding valued the company at an impressive figure of $55 million.

Under Cojbasic's leadership, the organization is crafting hardware to expedite the production of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). This cryptographic method verifies certain data without disclosing its details. It has been widely employed in various blockchain networks especially Ethereum for scaling solutions.

"Web3 infrastructure is the first innovative tech in recent history that requires hardware acceleration on day one," Cojbasic said. "We consider ourselves web3 compute infrastructure enablers and we believe that mass adoption will be achieved with our custom web3-friendly ZKP compute platform."

Generally, generating proofs can be a costly and time-consuming process when resorting to traditional computing technology. And that's without being concerned with the difficulty of keeping up with all the different types of Zero-Knowledge Proofs currently in development — an obstacle even for expert engineers.

To bolster effectiveness, Cojbasic revealed that Ulvetanna's group — featuring employees from Coinbase, Microsoft and Intel — will use their cryptographic expertise alongside specially-developed hardware to expedite proof production.

Cojbasic believes that the production of proofs will naturally lend itself to revenue generation, in a similar way to how acting as a validator on a proof-of-stake blockchain or solving cryptographic puzzles on a proof-of-work chain reaps rewards. 

"Provers who generate ZKPs will be essential actors in the networks/protocols, similar to how miners and stakers have the role of confirming transactions on proof-of-work and proof-of-stake blockchains," he explained. "Once the networks/protocols see wider adoptions, provers will be compensated per processed transaction." 

While last year saw a dramatic drop in revenues as a result of declining bitcoin prices and soaring energy costs, in 2021 Bitcoin miners drew in more than $15 billion in revenue. According to a post on its website in April last year, Paradigm's Chief Technology Officer and research partner Georgios Konstantopoulos believes that the opportunity for ZK provers could be similar to the size of the mining market for proof-of-work blockchains. 

While currently in pre-production, Ulvetanna plans to primarily focus on generating ZKPs for Layer 2 zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine networks, a scaling technology that utilizes zero-knowledge technology. It will use the funding to further build out its team and invest further in servers and hardware computer chipping to power its platform. 

Mike

An editor at Coincrop

View articles

Mike is a Coincrop staff writer based in the UK, covering the best rates for cryptocurrency earning and borrowing products. When not at work, he's likely putting his latest car project back together.