Altcoin News: Bitmain, Polychain and Others Invested over $10 Million in the NuCypher Blockchain Project
October 7, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
The blockchain project to ensure data privacy in decentralized applications NuCypher attracted $10.67 million in additional funding in anticipation of the launch of its main network, writes The Block.
The main investor was the venture capital firm Polychain Capital, which was joined by Y Combinator, Bitmain, Bitfury, Arrington XRP Capital and others.
According to NuCypher, investors acquired 8% of the initial offer of their own tokens in their NU network and agreed to stake-lock them for 2 years in order to use them as collateral for obtaining node authority. The total amount of investments collected by the startup reached $15.825 million.
NuCypher was launched in 2015 to support developers of decentralized applications (dApps) who need to store, transfer and manage private data on public blockchains. For example, its solution can be used by healthcare applications on the Ethereum blockchain to store patient medical records.
“Simply encrypting the records with the patient’s key isn’t quite enough since those records might need to be shared with doctors, hospitals, or insurance providers. The NuCypher network provides the functionality needed to keep data encrypted and also shareable with valid recipients under certain conditions, but protected from everyone else (including the network itself),” the company explained.
Services such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure provide the ability to manage keys in the cloud but do not protect information from the service provider itself, which distinguishes them from the NuCypher decentralized solution.
Also today, NuCypher launched a public test network, which allows developers to create their own applications and run nodes without requiring company permission. The new capital will help NuCypher conduct stress testing of the network and support further development. The launch of the main network of the project is expected to take place in the first quarter of 2020.
The developers call the NU token “working,” since it is used exclusively for stacking in the mechanisms of protecting the network from Sibyl attacks and coordinating actions in it. The project organizers declare that they are not going to deal with ensuring the liquidity of their token and will shift this task to open market participants.
Author: Marko Vidrih
