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 investment from StarkWare, Nicolas Bacca (cofounder of Ledger), Uma Roy (cofounder of Succinct Labs), @Oxkrane, BatuX, Richard Yuen, Robin Davids, and others.

At Hylé, we are pioneering a more flexible Web3 infrastructure, allowing applications to leverage ZKPs for enhanced scalability and privacy. By offering a secure, decentralized, censorship-resistant settlement layer for all ZKPs, we provide the essential layer for the modular ZK stack.

Harnessing the power of zero-knowledge proofs

Thanks to zero-knowledge proofs, you can ensure that a program has been run properly, according to the parameters you want. You only need to verify the proof.

Before this breakthrough, the only way to have these guarantees was to either trust a centralized entity like a cloud provider or run the program on the blockchain yourself, which is absurdly expensive and cumbersome.

ZKPs allow for the best of both worlds. They achieve truthfulness without relying on a centralized actor or incurring massive costs with a decentralized network.

The Hylé network is built specifically for ZKP verification. We will verify all zero-knowledge proof schemes, allowing everyone to choose the system that best fits their needs. Applications can choose their execution environment, data availability solution, and proof system while remaining permissionless.

We will finally treat zk-proofs as first-class citizens. Our dedicated blockchain will bring the cost of their verification down to zero. With Hylé, any developer can build high-performance apps that inherit all the security guarantees of blockchains without compromising on performance.

Currently, many ZK apps are only a dream. For instance, zkML’s performance and cost make it impossible to build a viable solution. But with a dedicated verification layer, we’re opening a brand new design space − and with it, the future of web3.

Our story

What led us here

We created briq, the first NFT protocol on Starknet. This is how we became acquainted with zero-knowledge proof and the power of dedicated tools to harness them, like Cairo. Then we worked on the Dojo engine with Cartridge and Realms. We realized that the future is made of provable applications that run off-chain and verify their execution on-chain.

Today, settling zk-proofs is complex and expensive, which has been a huge limitation on the potential of provable apps. After all, that’s why zk-rollups, which are more secure and practical, are still trailing behind optimistic rollups in popularity. Verifying and settling proofs is often too expensive to be viable.

We dreamed of removing all the unnecessary blockchain bells and whistles and keeping only the bare minimum: proof verification. No company did what we had in mind.

That’s how Hylé was born.

What comes next

We already support the Risc Zero, Groth16, and SP1 proving schemes and plan to add more soon. Hylé also has a public devnet available, as well as instructions for builders to run their devnet and experiment with it.

Our short-term goal is to settle rollups and RaaS and to increase the number of supported proving schemes.

Building the future of the modular blockchain

Thanks to this funding round, Hylé can build the tools for anyone to develop high-performance applications that inherit from all the decentralized properties of blockchains while running complex logic across smart contracts with off-chain execution and lower storage costs.

We’re excited!

“Hylé provides a verifiable source of truth for end-users, something that immediately caught our attention. Their approach ensures this is accomplished in a cost-efficient way that provides enhanced security compared to existing methods. With their focus on ease-of-use as well as having native verification and composability, we see Hylé as being highly differentiated and at the forefront of ensuring users have access to ZKP applications, enabling them to freely create transactions composing both private and public inputs.”

− Vance Spencer, co-founder of Framework Ventures

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