Blockchain research and development (R&D) startup Matter Labs, revealed that it raised two million dollars ($2M) in a seed round. The round was lead by Placeholder VC who believed in the program’s potential. The company will be utilizing the funds to develop a product based on zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for the Ethereum blockchain.
As the development of Ethereum 2.0 continues, numerous initiatives have begun emerging for Ethereum scaling. These initiatives include sharding, zero knowledge-SNARKs, Plasma, Raiden, among many others.
Matter Labs: Scalability to Ethereum by using ZKPs
Matter Labs have unveiled their own product to make Ethereum more scalable. Matter Labs CEO, Alex Gluchowski claims that the solution would be much more scalable than the network is today. Furthermore, he claimed that the product would not be “sacrificing decentralization or security. In fact, Alex claimed that depositing funds on the solution will be just as secure as depositing on the Ethereum network itself.
Alex claimed that ZKPs are “mathematical magic” that would allow transactions on the Ethereum chain at a much higher speed at a relatively low cost. Alex claims that the solution will have a very high data throughput. According to him, the solution will be “predictively cheap because the bulk of the cost will be coming from [ZKP] computation.”
However, Alex revealed that Matter Labs is still working on ZKP research, and it is still in its early stages. Matter Labs have created a prototype of their platform and is currently working on a new minimum viable product.
Seed round investors
Placeholder VC was joined in the seed round by various other investors including 1kx, Dekrypt, and Hashed. The seed round managed to raise two million dollars ($2M). All involved companies were consumed by the idea of leveraging ZKPs. Dekrypt Co-Founder stated that wrapping myriads of transactions on ethereum into verifiable proofs was a “really cool way to try and bring scalability to ethereum.”
Alex revealed that the company has also received over a hundred thousand dollars ($100k) in various grants by the Ethereum Foundation across 2019.
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