Seismic, an emerging encrypted blockchain developer, has successfully raised $7 million in a funding round led by a16z Crypto, the web3 investment arm of Andreessen Horowitz.
Other participants in the round included Polychain, 1kx, dao5, and NGC, signaling strong institutional backing for the company’s mission to implement on-chain privacy at the application level.
Unlike conventional privacy solutions that primarily focus on wallet-level encryption —hiding balances and user identities— Seismic is pioneering a base-layer approach to app-level encryption, aiming to extend privacy across financial applications, social platforms, and broader on-chain interactions.
While zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) have been widely adopted to verify transactions without revealing sensitive data, they come with limitations in composability and execution speed. Seismic is attempting to solve these inefficiencies by integrating encryption into the foundation of its blockchain, creating a seamless environment for developers to build private applications without compromising efficiency.
a16z Bets on Encryption
The investment highlights the increasing demand for privacy-focused blockchain solutions. According to a16z Crypto General Partner Ali Yahya, most smart contract platforms that prioritize privacy require users to generate zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) locally before submitting them to a decentralized network.
The typical approach to building a private smart contract platform involves clients creating zero-knowledge proofs of correct execution on their local machine, and then sharing those proofs with a decentralized network. This approach can guarantee correctness, but hampers composability. All parties know that the state transition function was executed correctly, but only participants with the transparent state can compute over it. This means that applications involving computation over shared private state are all but impossible.
Yahya noted that Seismic is taking a different approach, already running in devnet and enabling new use cases that were previously difficult to implement due to composability limitations.
Seismic is currently operating in devnet, with plans to launch its developer testnet within a month. Founder Lyron Co Ting Keh emphasized the necessity of encryption as an integral foundation of blockchain infrastructure rather than an added layer.
While the project is still in its early stages, the team has committed to an end-of-year mainnet launch, contingent on maintaining its current development pace. The fresh capital will be allocated to expanding Seismic’s engineering team, refining its encryption protocols, and ensuring a smooth deployment of its public network.
Disclaimer
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