P0x Labs, the cryptographic development team building Manta Network, announced its $25 million Series A.
With major contributions from Polychain Capital and Qiming Venture Partners, P0x Labs, the cryptographic development team behind Manta Network, has announced that it has raised $25 million in a Series A fundraising round.
The funding increases the company’s valuation to $500 million. A press release from Manta Network mentions that the layer-2 infrastructure’s testnet, dubbed Manta Pacific, has been added to the ecosystem for zero-knowledge (ZK) applications.
The money raised will be used to develop Manta Pacific’s network, draw in additional users, and investigate other use cases. CEO of Manta Network Kenny Li emphasized Manta Pacific’s main objective, which is to streamline the development of features and apps while guaranteeing user-friendliness, in an interview.
Although ZK has drawn attention as a worthwhile proposal, according to Li, it primarily functions as a feature set that supports a variety of application use cases.
The difficulty, however, comes from the possibility that decentralized software creators need more cryptography knowledge or would rather forego a high learning curve. Li says this: Manta Pacific’s ZK application layer, which uses pre-compiled circuits that can be effortlessly integrated into programs with little code, overcomes the obstacle.
In Li’s opinion, implementing ZK applications for patient data, which involves gaining self-sovereignty and ownership of one’s medical data, is the ultimate objective.
But according to Li, this objective is still years away because it is difficult to gather and access hospitals’ fragmented data because they are not driven to use blockchain technology or effectively manage their data.
Li claims that Manta Network has discovered a use case in finance where users are given staked tokens based on their holdings on exchanges like Binance.
According to him, privacy issues occur when individuals hesitate to provide identification because doing so would expose their entire wallet. Li addressed this by mentioning the introduction of a privacy layer via ZK-enhanced staked tokens, similar to the Binance account-bound token, and has generated roughly 58,000 confirmed user mints.
This prioritizes user privacy while improving the utility of staked tokens for identity reasons. Users can presently access several ZK applications on Manta Pacific’s testnet, including zkPass, a privacy-preserving protocol for data verification, zkMe, a protocol for private and validated credentials, and zkHoldEm, a fully on-chain and private Texas Hold’em game.
Launched in April 2023, Manta Atlantic’s nonfungible token private offering platform has since produced approximately 300,000 zero-knowledge soulbond tokens among significant ecosystem participants, including Arbitrum, Galxe, Linea, and CyberConnect.
