Princeton Expertise-Backed Startup Raises $3.7 Mln to Develop Smart Contract Scalability

Published at: April 3, 2019

Offchain Labs, a blockchain startup co-founded by a professor at Princeton University, has raised $3.7 million in a seed round led by crypto hedge fund Pantera Capital, TechCrunch reports on April 3.

The new funding round was also supported by Compound VC, Raphael Ouzan of Blocknation, Jake Seid, managing director at Stone Bridge Ventures and others.

With the investment, Offchain aims to solve major problems associated with enterprise blockchain implementations by bringing more scalability and privacy.

By deploying its own protocol, Arbitrum, Offchain developers intend to bring make smart contracts more scalable. Offchain co-founder Ed Felten said that the firm is working on a platform that allows for the scaling of smart contracts in a way that is currently hard to do.

Felten, who is both a computer science professor at Princeton and a former deputy CTO to the White House under former President Obama, explained that the platform represents a combination of scalability with a special method of writing data on smart contracts. He elaborated:

“We’re working to build a platform for smart contract development that provides what we think developers want, a combination of scalability so that you can scale to more transactions per second, more users, and to contracts that have more code and still have more data in them.”

In addition to scalability, Offchain also wants to make smart contracts more private by moving a part of data about the contracts off of a public blockchain.

In other recent funding news, blockchain startup Bison Trails received an investment of $5.25 million in a seed round backed by Mike Novogratz’s crypto merchant bank Galaxy Digital.

Earlier in February, Zurich-based blockchain startup B3i Service AG raised $16 million to develop a blockchain trading platform for a value-added chain of the entire insurance industry.

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Blockchain
United States
Scalability
Investments
Privacy
Pantera Capital
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