QED Protocol, the first zk-native execution layer for powering the Web3 ecosystem emerging on Bitcoin, announced 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.