Zero knowledge-proof startup Axiom announced it had raised $20 million in Series A funding co-led by Paradigm and Standard Crypto. The company – which is know as the first ZKP co-processor for Ethereum – gives smart contract developers cheaper and more efficient access to data on-chain.
This funding round comes on the heels of the Axiom V2 mainnet release, which provides developers access to the full history of Ethereum on-chain. It integrates with past transaction activity, other dapps, and augments existing applications.
Smart contracts currently operate in a data-starved environment. And reading and writing data is the most expensive operation for smart contracts, making applications reliant on large amounts of data prohibitively expensive or impossible to run on-chain. On-chain applications adapted to the excessive cost of data by removing features or carefully crafting contracts to optimize data usage. And the result is that developers cannot leverage data at scale and are forced to architect their smart contracts in unwieldy ways.
This means basic features such as on-chain voting for governance have to be baked into token contracts from inception. And others like referral codes for user acquisition increase gas costs enough to only be viable on-chain for the highest dollar use cases. A big issue of developer and user experience issues is the high price of authenticated data. So on-chain applications need cheaper data access.
Axiom introduced a new approach to authenticated data access which uses ZK cryptography instead of consensus. And by using ZK, Axiom allows on-chain applications to compute over more data at a lower cost, starting with the entire history of Ethereum in our recent Axiom V2 mainnet release. This enables developers to:
— Incorporate past transaction activity trustlessly in their on-chain applications
— Permissionlessly compose with other smart contracts
— Add modular pieces to on-chain applications without modifying existing deployed business logic
Along wtih Standard Crypto and Paradigm, the company is also backed by funds including Robot Ventures and Ethereal Ventures and some builders from across ZK and crypto: Hasu from Flashbots, Sandy, Ye and Haichen from Scroll, Alex from OpenSea, Sreeram and Calvin from EigenLabs, Liam from Optimism / ETH Global, Collin from Obol, Lakshman from Personae, Stephen and Jazzy from Zellic, Brendan and Daniel from Polygon, Zac and Joe from Aztec, and many others.
