Zero-knowledge project Hylé has raised $2.6 million in new funding led by venture firm Framework Ventures.
Cherry Crypto, Fabric Ventures, First Capital, and Heartcore Capital also participated in this round. To date, Hylé’s total initial funding is $3.4 million, and it has generated an additional $1.5 million in revenue from its NFT project briqNFT, the company’s co-founder Sylve Chevet told The Block. Hylé’s board of directors will not change.
Hylé builds the Hylé Network using zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) for scalability and privacy. According to a release shared with The Block, Hylé wants to become a core layer of the modular ZK technology stack. The Hyle network runs its own consensus mechanism and is built specifically for ZKP verification, providing developers and users with options that suit their system.
The company plans to use the funding to launch the mainnet as quickly as possible and onboard backend experts and protocol engineers to build additional proof-of-concept schemes such as Polygon zkEVM, Cairo, and Noir. The proof scheme uses cryptography to verify items without revealing sensitive information.
Hyle will also create tools for developers who want to leverage zero-knowledge techniques in their applications. “The goal is to help developers use ZK and abstract away the complexity by packaging all the amazing ZK technologies that exist but are not organized in a consistent way,” Chevet said. “Think of it as building react and reactive components for the frontend, but for ZK.”
Chevet added that zero-knowledge technology is “a fundamentally new innovation that goes beyond typical blockchain setups. We’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible.”
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About the author
MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020, joining just before Bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for publications covering all cryptocurrency-related news, preferring NFTs, metaverse, web3 games, fundraising, crime, hacking, and cryptocurrency ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. X You can follow MK at @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.