Bixin Ventures and Three Arrows Capital lead the strategic investment round, furthering o1Labs’ goal of ushering in a new era of accessibility for blockchain technology.
San Francisco, CA; October 21, 2020
o1Labs, the team behind Mina (formerly Coda Protocol)—the world’s lightest blockchain—raises $10.9M in a strategic investment round from partners throughout Asia. Co-leading the round are Bixin Ventures and Three Arrows Capital with participation from SNZ, HashKey Capital, Signum Capital, NGC Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, and IOSG Ventures, among others.
Previously, o1Labs raised a $3.5M seed round in May of 2018, followed by a $15M series A round in April 2019 from leading investors that included Polychain, Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures, General Catalyst, Accomplice, Metastable, Naval Ravikant, and others.
WangXi, Partner at Bixin Ventures, the leader in wallet and mining operations in Asia, based in Hong Kong said, “Mina protocol creates the best way to optimize scalability and decentralization for the Web 3.0 by using zero knowledge proofs to condense the blockchain into a fixed size.”
Kyle Davies, Founder of Three Arrows Capital, an investment fund based in Singapore, said, “Mina presents an elegant, light-weight, layer-one blockchain solution to the cryptographic trilemma of decentralization, scale, and security. As daily blockchain users ourselves, we are particularly excited to support the Mina team and ecosystem.”
“Mina addresses the failure of legacy blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum pricing users out of participation,” said Evan Shapiro, CEO and Co-Founder of o1Labs. “Instead, Mina leverages recursive zk-SNARKs to not only keep its blockchain at a manageable (22kb) size, but also to power zkApps, Snark-powered applications, which bring crucial privacy and off-chain interoperability benefits to crypto applications.”
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About Mina
Mina is the world’s lightest blockchain, powered by participants. Rather than apply brute computing force, Mina uses advanced cryptography and recursive zk-SNARKs to design an entire blockchain that is and always will be about 22kb, the size of a couple tweets, ushering in a new era of blockchain accessibility. With its robust decentralized network and open-programmable currency, Mina is powering a more efficient and fair Web 3.0 so anyone can participate, build, exchange and thrive. Mina is a project of o1Labs, a leader in verifiable computation.
About Mina Protocol
Mina is the world’s lightest blockchain, powered by participants. Rather than apply brute computing force, Mina uses advanced cryptography and recursive zk-SNARKs to design an entire blockchain that is about 22kb, the size of a couple of tweets. It is the first layer-1 to enable efficient implementation and easy programmability of zero knowledge smart contracts (zkApps). With its unique privacy features and ability to connect to any website, Mina is building a private gateway between the real world and crypto—and the secure, democratic future we all deserve.
