2024 in review

A letter from Sylve: the Hylé vision

It all began with an ambitious vision: creating a blockchain from the ground up, explicitly designed to enable developers to unlock the full potential of zero-knowledge proofs.

Over the past twelve months, we’ve grown from two cofounders with an unhinged slide deck to a full-fledged company collaborating with the best in the ecosystem. We’re delivering on our vision, and this is only the beginning.

The core beliefs that set us on this journey remain clear and strong:

• Exponential improvement of proving: Proving times have shrunk dramatically—from days for simple programs five years ago to minutes for entire EVM blocks today. With faster proving and better developer tools, zero-knowledge proofs are becoming more practical and accessible to developers.
• ZK makes blockchains inclusive: Beyond privacy and scaling, ZK technology excels at simplifying user onboarding. Tools like zkEmail and zkOnramping let users transfer value using familiar identifiers like emails or IDs, removing blockchain’s traditional complexities.
• Unifying the Internet with cryptography: data is digitally signed to guarantee security and authenticity. ZK enables this signed data to be seamlessly integrated into blockchains without relying on centralized intermediaries. As more data becomes cryptographically signed, the boundaries between Web2 and Web3 dissolve, merging into a unified digital ecosystem.

We’re headed for the Internet era of blockchain technology. Just like connecting computers created something bigger than the sum of its parts, connecting blockchain to the rest of the Internet with ZK technology will create something bigger than Web2 and Web3 individually.

Hylé is building the infrastructure to make this a reality by abstracting away the complexities of building with ZK, allowing developers to unleash ZK’s scalability, privacy, and accessibility properties.

This year, I’ve learned so much and met so many wonderful people; it’s unreal. I can only thank the Hylé team, builders, and supporters for their faith in our vision and unwavering support.

En route.

Our journey in 2024

We founded Hylé and completed our seed round

We’ve had the idea of Hylé for a long time. For two years already, we’d been thinking of how offchain execution, natively verified onchain, was the way to go.

The idea of Hylé really crystallized during a trip to Crete in November 2023 with Lancelot. 

− You know, it wouldn’t be that hard to actually build it from scratch.
− Really?
− Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, you only need to sequence transactions and settle. ZK takes care of most of the work anyway.

In early 2024, we decided to act on it and started hiring the team right away.

We moved fast, and in May, we announced our seed round, launching the Hylé adventure for good!

Hylé raises $3.4M to build the future of zk-proof verification

We are delighted to announce the closing of our seed round, led by Framework Ventures and bringing us to a total of $3.4M in funding! This round was co-led by Cherry Crypto, with support from Fabric Ventures, Frst Capital, and Heartcore Capital. In addition to these firms, we received

HyléAlex Sirac

We launched our proofs of concept

The first devnet

Before building the production-grade version of Hylé, we decided to create the first version leveraging the Cosmos SDK. So off we went, launching our first devnet in a matter of weeks and identifying exactly what we didn’t need.

The whole point of Hylé is that we’re a lean blockchain, so we don’t need a lot of the usual stuff blockchains require, like a runtime environment. We took the time to check out what we weren’t using and what could disappear. It turns out you don’t need a lot of things: a bit of sequencing, a bit of settlement, a bit of DA. And voilà.

Vibe Check: our first app!

Our devnet was ready, and all we needed now was a demo, so we built Vibe Check, a zkML & WebAuthn-powered zkApp that asserts a user has smiled and awards test tokens accordingly on Hylé.

Introducing Vibe Check

Introducing Vibe Check, a zkML & WebAuthn Powered zkApp asserting a user has smiled and awarding test tokens accordingly on Hylé.

HyléAlex Sirac

Building Vibe Check gave us many insights into what makes Hylé uniquely great for provable applications: proof composability, native verification, and pipelined proving make the world go round.

We made a bunch of friends

We started Real World Cryptography Paris

Given all the great minds who work on cryptography in Paris, it was surprising that there was no cryptography meetup. So we met with Nadim from Symbolic Software and a few fellow Parisian companies to organize Real World Cryptography Paris.

We’ve organized two meetups and gathered more than 70 people each time, with talks from OpenPassport, Ledger, Linea, 3miLabs, dfns, Web3 Foundation. We’re putting Paris back on the map.

We attended conferences

• We attended zkHack in Warsaw, where we helped our 1st builders ship on Hylé.
• We premiered Vibe Check at EthCC Brussels!
• During ETHCC, we also organized Trust Infrastructure Day with our friends from Aztec. It was a great occasion to talk about the future of programmable cryptography and what it will enable.
• We went to both zkSummits (and had many problems with our flights), in Athens and Lisbon.

We partnered with the best and brightest

During the past year, we’ve made a bunch of friends and are happy to call several fantastic companies our partners.

Electron, Gevulot, Kakarot, Marlin, NodeKit, Starkware, and Sindri are among the most innovative and recognized companies in the ZK space, and we are honored to work alongside them.

Shipping mode

We wrote the Rust client for Hylé

With the dream team fully formed, we started working on an entirely new Rust client for Hylé in what would soon become our main repository.

We thought of many innovative solutions to problems traditional blockchains face. We settled (hah!) on using the Autobahn consensus system, introducing pipelined proving and native proof composability on Hylé.

We met people, and they built stuff

During that time, we participated in two ODHacks, allowing developers to contribute to Hylé and learning how to support developers who wanted to build with us.

We also signed our first grants! Our very first grantee was Matteo, who built a play-by-email provable game engine leveraging zkEmail, Risc0, and Hylé.

Two other wonderful builders soon followed him: we’re looking forward to showcasing their projects on our blog and beyond!

We launched a podcast

Speaking of Matteo, he was the very first guest on the Hylé podcast. This is a monthly podcast, with episodes lasting 30-45 minutes, where we talk about real-world use cases for zero-knowledge proofs, cryptography, and trust infrastructure in general.

As of today, we’ve had three monthly episodes:

• Matteo talked about provable play-by-email games
• Kitty talked about how Rarimo protects democracy in authoritarian regimes (and beyond!)
• David discussed onchain gaming with me. Part 2 will drop in January, so don’t miss it!

Gaining momentum

In October 2024, the business team flew to Lisbon, Portugal, for zkSummit 12. We saw a bunch of friends, watched some great talks, and organized a fancy petit-déjeuner, of course!

Following this, we joined the zkBoost consortium alongside the best companies in the ZK space. Today, ZK technologies still need improvement. We’ll only reach massive adoption once we've standardized and streamlined how developers should work with them. That’s why we’re so excited to be one of the first companies in the consortium!

In November, the leadership team flew to Bangkok for an exciting DevCon week, jumping from one side event to another to deliver talks about Hylé and the future of zero-knowledge technology. Did you miss some? Then check out the talks and panels we’ve shared on our blog!

We coached sheep

We celebrated the end of this exhilarating first year at Hylé by going into deep rural France, discussing the company’s vision for the future, and coaching sheep as one does.

Where we’re at

2024 was an intense year, and we’ve done a lot! Now, let’s talk about what you can do with Hylé today.

Build provable apps

You can build and learn about provable apps.

If you prefer to discover Hylé on your own and want to either play around with it or test it with an existing project, you should start running a devnet and building freely. In that case, we’ll be happy to support you if you need anything: send us a message in our Telegram group!

Maybe you’ve got a specific project that you think we’d be interested in, or you’ve read some of our ideas, and something’s really speaking to you. Then, why not apply for a grant?

Learn about lean blockchains

Hylé is a lean blockchain, and we’ve created a whole bunch of resources to explain it better.

Here are three links to learn more about lean blockchains, provable applications, and Hylé:

• Sylve’s interview on the House of ZK podcast
• Lancelot’s zkSummit talk on pipelined proving and native proof composability
• Sylve’s opinion that smart wallets must be provable

As well as all the blog posts and videos we linked above, of course!

We are just getting started creating these resources, so we recommend signing up for our newsletter, following us on Twitter and LinkedIn, and joining our Telegram group, too!

What to expect from Hylé now

Our vision is a blockchain platform on which developers can build seamless, trusted, and powerful applications leveraging ZK technology. Whether enabling private payments, verifiable computation, or frictionless user experiences, we’re working to empower developers with tools to build the next wave of digital interactions. 

We will launch our testnet in early 2025 and build a suite of tools and applications during the year that will inspire developers to reimagine what’s possible.

We want to remain the lean and efficient team that can build a lean and efficient blockchain, and that will be our North Star in 2025. Our main area of focus will be building the Discovery team: a team of builders who will ship groundbreaking applications that solve real-world problems while shaping Hylé’s evolution through hands-on experimentation. Stay tuned if that’s something you’d be interested in, and get ready to share the news with friends who’d be perfect for these roles − we’ll announce more in Q1!

It’s been an incredible first year for Hylé, and we’re really proud of what we’ve built up to now. The road ahead is very long, and we’re excited to tackle it one mile at a time with all of you by our side. We’re always happy to talk on Telegram, so don’t hesitate to reach out!

In the meantime, we wish you all a very happy 2025.

Let’s do this!