Secret Network offers $400M in funding to bring others in on the secret

Secret Network is offering $400 million in funding to grow its privacy-oriented ecosystem and expand user adoption.

Secret Network is a decentralized ecosystem that utilizes trusted execution environments to enable private, secure computation over encrypted data. The ecosystem has four components: Secret Tokens, Secret Bridges, Secret Finance and Secret NFTs.

According to a Jan. 19 announcement, the privacy-oriented platform is offering a $225 million ecosystem fund and a $175 million accelerator fund with support from 25 existing investors and partners, including BlockTower Capital, Arrington Capital, Fenbushi Capital, Outlier, Spartan Group, and Figment.

The Founder of Secret Foundation Tor Bair told Cointelegraph the funding would further the network’s aim to "scale privacy-first, decentralized applications to global adoption by millions of users," as he emphasized the importance of Web3 technology:

“Privacy technologies are essential to ensure that Web 3.0 will be empowering and open, rather than an extension of the failures of Web 2.0.”

The ecosystem fund will be used to expand the project’s application layer, network infrastructure, and tooling. The accelerator pool will provide non-dilutive capital, grants and incentives via its native token SCRT to quickly expand user adoption.

Secret Network also revealed that numerous top-tier investment firms recently acquired SCRT positions and joined the ecosystem as critical stakeholders, including Alameda Research, DeFiance Capital, CoinFund, and HashKey.

The ecosystem funding is a part of the Shockwave initiative, a vision for Secret Network’s global growth, which was announced on Jan. 12. Shockwave aims to cement the ecosystem’s standing as a privacy hub for Web 3.0.

Related: Miramax sues Tarantino over ‘money grab’ Pulp Fiction NFTs

Bair said that a global, privacy focused network was an essential part of building a better internet:

“Private-by-default networks and applications create choices for users and allow them to control and consent to how their data is used. The entire Secret community is dedicated to protecting users, providing security, and fighting against surveillance capitalism — a system that exploits instead of empowering.”

The funding news follows Secret Network’s freshly launched auctions for a collection of seven highly-anticipated NFTs issued by Quentin Tarantino on Jan. 17. The collection consists of seven chapters of Tarantino’s original, handwritten screenplay of Pulp Fiction, the first chapter of which has been sold and will be announced on Jan. 24.