Coda Leads $15 Mln Funding Round for O(1) Labs Including Coinbase and Paradigm

Blockchain scalability project Coda has completed a new $15 million funding round for O(1) Labs, Coda announced on April 2.

According to Coda, the new funding round involved major technology investors such as Accomplice, Coinbase Ventures, Paradigm, and General Catalyst.

As specified on its website, Coda is a cryptocurrency protocol with a “tiny portable blockchain,” swapping the traditional blockchain for small cryptographic proof, which enables a cryptocurrency to be as accessible as any other app or website.

Specifically, Coda aims to address blockchain’s scalability problem by compressing blocks and providing zero-knowledge proofs rather than most crypto-related firms, whose blockchains reach hundreds of gigabytes in size, according to Coda.

Launched in September 2018, Coda's testnet compresses its entire blockchain into a one kilobyte zk-SNARK proof, which serves as a cryptographic certificate of the protocol state's integrity. This certificate, dubbed a "succinct blockchain", aims replace other gigabytes-long blockchains that are used for validation in various cryptocurrencies.

By using a constant and small-sized blockchain, Coda claims to provide the same level of security as a standard blockchain with at a fraction of the hardware requirements, enabling full verification of the chain from any device.

Blockchain’s scalability problem has been a major roadblock to mass adoption. Recently, Princeton expertise-backed blockchain startup Offchain Labs raised $3.7 million in order to develop tools to bring more scalability and privacy to enterprise blockchain implementations.