POx labs, the team behind Manta Network, has bagged $25 million in a Series A round co-led by Polychain Capital and Qiming Venture Partners.
The round – joined by Alliance, CoinFund, and SevenX Ventures – has brought the firm’s valuation to $500 million, the company announced on Thursday.
Manta Network is a multi-modular ecosystem for zero-knowledge (ZK) applications, which refers to a cryptographic technique that enables users to undergo transactions without compromising sensitive information.
Its Layer 2 solution, dubbed Manta Pacific, claims to be the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM)-native modular execution layer that enables wide adoption of ZK technology. The test network of the Layer 2 solutions will be launched alongside the fundraising announcement.
The funding proceeds will also be used to scale Manta Pacific’s network, user base, and use cases, per the release.
“We believe that ZK could onboard a substantial number of users through many applied use cases in the new Asia markets,” Yi Tang, principal at Qiming Venture Partners said. The Chinese VC has previously invested in crypto financial services platform Matrixport, crypto wallet firm ImToken, and staking service firm Hashquark.
ZK technology has emerged as one of the promising solutions to crack into the scalability and privacy challenges long faced by the Ethereum blockchain. Known as the ‘scalability trilemma’ or ‘blockchain trilemma’, it means that a blockchain system can at most have only two of the three necessary properties at the same time including decentralisation, scalability, and security.
Layer 1 refers to the base blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum while Layer 2 is related to a network, system, or technology built on top of an underlying blockchain protocol to solve and improve the scalability issue.
Investors have been increasingly drawn to Layer 1 and Layer 2 solutions solving issues that have long hindered mainstream adoption.