Announcing our $4.2M Raise
Light Protocol Labs is extremely excited to announce completion of a $4.2M seed round led by Polychain Capital with participation from Hypersphere, Solana Ventures, Dao5, Asymmetric, Anagram and Ecco Capital. Advanced Blockchain and dLab led a previous fundraise and also joined in this round. Notable angels Balaji Srinivasan, Algod Trading, The Crypto Dog, Steve Vassallo, Michelle Lai, Jules de Smit, Yonatan Ben-Shimon and Norbert Bodziony also participated in the round. A special thanks to Luke Pearson for his help in this fundraise. We plan to use the new capital to support developing our privacy and compliance tooling for the Solana ecosystem.
Light Protocol aims to be a ZK Privacy Layer powering the majority of Solana apps through robust security and unnoticeable privacy UX. You can read more about our vision and what we call the “UX-liquidity flywheel” in this post.
We open-sourced a concept of such a ZK Privacy Layer with Solana’s first ZK-SNARK on-chain verification back in January ’22. In April, we launched Light Shield, a first user-facing implementation built on top of Light’s Privacy SDK.
We will soon launch the next iteration of the Light Privacy Layer to finally scale privacy with “unnoticeable UX”. The upcoming protocol upgrade makes general-purpose ZK and privacy on Solana ultra-efficient, with full on-chain ZK-SNARK verification in 0.5s and <$0.001 fees.
Developers will also benefit from strong, thoughtfully-designed compliance controls.
“If we want to see widespread crypto adoption happen, privacy needs to be an easily configured default. Light Protocol not only has the ZK experience to build a best-in-class technical solution, but also the laser focus on user experience required to make such default privacy commonplace. We’re proud to continue supporting this incredible team as they deliver the missing privacy layer for Solana.”
— Nick Plante, Partner @dLab
Beyond the upcoming Light Protocol upgrade, we’re working with partners to ship some exciting products for privacy and compliance use cases in the coming weeks and months. Expect detailed documentation and deep dives about these systems soon.
Until then, if you’re building with NFTs, DeFi, payments or wallets on Solana and you’re thinking about exploring use cases for privacy, reach out to us via email or Telegram. Also stay tuned for more on Twitter; we’re just getting started :)
