Tracy Wang
Tracy is a deputy managing editor at CoinDesk. She owns BTC, ETH, MINA, ENS, various stablecoins, and some NFTs.
Sovereign Labs, a crypto project focused on building rollups, has raised $7.4 million in seed funding.
The round was led by Haun Ventures with participation from Maven 11, 1KX, Robot Ventures and Plaintext Capital. The fundraise puts the company’s valuation in the “eight-figure” range, according to a spokesperson for the project. Sovereign Labs declined to disclose its exact valuation.
Sovereign Labs is building a software development kit (SDK) that makes it easier for developers to create interoperable zero-knowledge rollups. A rollup is a special type of blockchain that derives some of its security from another blockchain, thereby allowing for scalability without sacrificing security.
The new Sovereign SDK is designed to be interoperable, scalable and able to be seamlessly deployed on any layer 1 blockchain.
“We’re actually completely agnostic on the blockchain our rollup rolls on,” said Cem Ozer, co-founder and CEO of Sovereign Labs, who added that rollups built with the Sovereign SDK will be compatible with any layer 1 blockchain.
Rollups powered by zero-knowledge, or zk, proofs use a type of cryptography that can prove the validity of a statement without the need to reveal the underlying information. Recently, the buzzy sector has also been attracting ample venture funding, as well as serving as a core component for existing crypto projects like zkSync, Starknet, Zcash and Mina.
“Building with zero-knowledge has historically been accessible only to a few PhDs in cryptography,” said Preston Evans, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, in a statement. “At Sovereign Labs we’re building tools which are accessible to normal developers.”
Ozer and Evans added that Sovereign Labs did not have plans to launch a token, adding they are “100% focused” on building out the SDK framework.
“From our perspective, the other systems (like subnets or bridges) all lose the core trait of blockchains, which is end-user verification,” said Ozer. “If we lose that, we might as well have built these systems on [Amazon Web Services].”
