Quick take:
The seed round was structured as a simple agreement for future equity with token warrants and closed at a valuation of $20 million.
Wei Dai, a research partner at 1kx, joins Ligero’s board of directors as part of the deal.
The company will use the funds to expand its engineering and business development teams.
Ligero, a zero-knowledge proofs-focused infrastructure platform, has raised $4 million in a seed round co-led by Galaxy Ventures and 1kx. Franklin Templeton, Nascent, Anagram, Robot Ventures, and Digital Currency Group also participated in the fundraising.
Ligero co-founder Matt DiBiase told The Block that the round was structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) with token warrants, valuing the Web3 startup at $20 million.
According to the announcement, Wei Dai, a research partner at 1kx, joins Ligero’s board of directors as part of the deal. The company plans to use the fresh capital to expand its engineering and business development teams.
Ligero also announced the launch of Ligetron, a zkVM platform “capable” of handling 1,000 transactions per second (TPS) on a single NVIDIA L40S GPU with under 2 GB CPU RAM. The company also claims that a browser-based implementation can achieve 100 TPS, paving the way for mobile-based zk proof-powered applications.
Commenting on Ligetron’s high-performance levels and possible applications, co-founder, CEO and CTO Muthu Venkitasubramaniam said: “The next-gen DeFi, gaming, ML applications, and real-world asset tokenization will crucially depend on scalable privacy.”
Venkitasubramaniam believes while there are plenty of zk-powered L2s, they are “simply too cumbersome for practical use and lack composability.”
Existing ZK-SNARKs powering L2 technology are not suited for true privacy applications given that they can’t run client-side and require significant hardware on the server side. By contrast, Ligetron is the first and only memory-efficient ZKVM that can be deployed on any device — from a Raspberry Pi to an NVIDIA H100 — delivering consistent and scalable performance,” added Venkitasubramaniam.
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