QED Protocol Raises $6 Million for Scaling with Bitcoin-powered Tech
03 July 2024 - 9:37PM
Business Wire
Funding for the high-performance, zk-native
blockchain led by Blockchain Capital
QED Protocol, the first zk-native execution layer for powering
the Web3 ecosystem emerging on Bitcoin, announced today that it has
raised $6 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital. The
fresh influx of capital furthers QED’s mission of utilizing its
novel technology to unlock unparalleled performance for smart
contracts, layer-two solutions and a wide variety of Web3
applications.
Among QED’s breakthroughs is a novel solution for verification
of zero-knowledge proofs, or ZKPs, on Bitcoin that radically
increases scalability while preserving maximum security. This is a
first-of-its-kind innovation in the ZK world that can unlock
significant performance enhancements, enabling native smart
contracts that had previously been lacking on Bitcoin and holding
out the potential for applications to be powered with minimal
latency and with speeds already capable of surpassing 150,000
transactions per second.
In a statement, QED founder Carter Feldman lauded the recent
funding and emphasized how QED’s technology is compatible with
Bitcoin Core by harnessing the power of Taproot script and
ZKPs.
“This funding round is key to pursuing our mission to bring
Bitcoin security to all of digital finance, but in a way that
unlocks unmatched performance and utility,” said Feldman. “Indeed,
our aim is to extend the full security of Bitcoin to all of Web3
and eventually the rest of the internet, and, in doing so, our
value proposition is simple: high throughput, low latency and
application-friendly performance that benefits the masses.”
In another statement, Aleks Larsen, General Partner at
Blockchain Capital, expressed enthusiasm for QED’s breakthrough
technology, particularly when it comes to the potential for
powering a wide variety of applications with novel use cases within
the growing Bitcoin-centric ecosystem.
“QED brings the power of ZK to Bitcoin in a way that is both as
trust minimized as possible and extremely cost-efficient, unlocking
Bitcoin-native smart contracts and scaling solutions that have long
been considered unviable,” Larsen said. “We’re thrilled to back the
brilliant QED team as they usher in a new era of Bitcoin
innovation.”
Along with adding groundbreaking smart contract functionality to
the Bitcoin ecosystem, QED’s security model is tightly aligned with
Bitcoin’s own proof-of-work consensus model and does away with
fragile economic-incentive models and trusted multisigs which could
be used to misappropriate user funds on layer 2s. Additionally,
with its horizontally scalable architecture, QED sidesteps entirely
the traditional tradeoffs with security and scalability by using
its breakthrough architecture that utilizes fast-recursive
zero-knowledge proofs and a first-of-its-kind PARTH state model
which combine to enable hyperscalable Web3 applications such as
orderbook exchanges, as well as fully trustless Web2-scale
applications and games.
QED protocol has raised more than $10 million thus far, securing
earlier this year a pre-seed funding round of $3.25 million that
was led by Arrington Capital and included other notable investors
such as Starkware, Draper Dragon, Blockchain Builders Fund, UTXO,
Lbank Labs, Paper Ventures, Valhalla Capital, Edessa Capital and
Anagram Ltd.
For more information on QED Protocol, please follow on X/Twitter
and/or read more at qedprotocol.com/blog/.
About QED
QED is Bitcoin's native execution layer, designed to address the
challenges of Web3 development. The horizontally scalable, secure
and user-friendly platform is built for developers and users alike,
supporting a wide range of applications from DeFi to NFTs and
beyond.
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