A number of web3 companies have achieved impressive valuations in spite of the challenges posed by the crypto winter.
P0x Labs, the company that developed the Manta Network, which is a privacy-preserving protocol on the Polkadot blockchain, just recently made an announcement that the company’s valuation has increased to $500 million after it successfully raised $25 million in Series A funding.
The leading investors in this round are Polychain Capital and Qiming Venture Partners. Both of these firms are well known for their support of web3 projects such as the imToken wallet and the InfStones web3 infrastructure platform. In addition, Alliance, CoinFund, and SevenX Ventures have shown their support.
It is important to note that Binance Labs, the investment arm of the company, has previously made an investment in P0x Labs.
The growing demand for zero-knowledge technology, which is gaining importance in decentralized finance (DeFi) by resolving the difficulty of maintaining blockchain transparency while protecting user privacy, is helping to boost the valuation of P0x Labs.
A zero-knowledge proof is a type of cryptographic protocol that allows one party to demonstrate the veracity of a statement to another without disclosing any additional information. It gives users the ability to transact anonymously on DeFi platforms without having to divulge the addresses of their wallets or the specifics of their transactions on the blockchain.
P0x Labs is competing with Aleo and Aztec to develop a private layer for web3 using this technology. This will result in improved privacy and security for blockchain applications.
Manta Network has made encouraging progress despite the fact that blockchain-based applications have struggled to achieve widespread adoption due to usability issues. They have distributed more than 300,000 “soulbound ” zero-knowledge tokens, which are a special kind of zero-knowledge token that is indelibly linked to a particular blockchain address and provides a high level of safety.
For the purpose of managing one-of-a-kind digital assets, such as identity verification and property ownership, Soulbound tokens are gaining a lot of traction as a result of their intransferability.
Over 200,000 users have downloaded and installed the Manta Wallet, which is the native wallet for the Manta Network. ReadOn, Dmail, and AsMatch have all implemented zkSBT (zero-knowledge soulbound token) functionality into their respective ecosystems.
This functionality caters to private user identity as well as other privacy features. These projects have a total user base that exceeds 1.5 million individuals.
These user numbers are relatively low when compared to those of some of the more well-known web2 applications. In spite of this, venture capitalists who put their money into blockchain technologies have a positive outlook.
How it is perceived:
Yi Tang, a principal at Qiming Venture Partners and the former head of ConsenSys in China, was optimistic about Manta’s potential and said the following:
In an interview with TechCrunch, Tang explained why his company made an investment in P0x Labs: “We recognize the team’s strong capabilities in cryptography research and development, as well as ecosystem building and execution.” “Trust and privacy are fundamental building blocks of web3, and ZKP is evolving into an instrument that is becoming indispensable for incorporating these qualities into blockchain protocols.
This region has a significant amount of untapped potential for expansion.
P0x Labs plans to put the funds from their most recent funding round toward the expansion of the testnet for Manta Pacific, which acts as Layer 2 for ZK applications that run on Manta.
In the world of cryptocurrencies, the term “Layer 2” refers to solutions that improve the transaction processing capacity of a blockchain by shifting some of the computational load away from the primary network.
In addition, the company’s expansion into key Asian markets will receive support from the newly raised capital.
On Manta Pacific, developers have already begun actively creating applications directed toward end users. zkMe is a protocol that enables private and verified credentials, and zkHoldEm is a decentralized and on-chain version of the popular Texas Hold ’em card game.
