Manta Network raises $25 million to launch ZK network

Developers of the EVM-compatible Manta Network закрыли a Series A round of $25 million to launch applications built on zero-knowledge proofs (ZK).

The leading investors were Polychain Capital and Qiming Venture Partners with participation from Alliance, CoinFund and SevenX Ventures. The round valued the company at $500 million.

The project team positions Manta Network as the fastest L1 network. Developers also launched a testnet second layer for ZK applications — Manta Pacific.

The funds will be used to scale the protocol, expand the user base and develop new use cases for Manta Pacific.

According to Kenny Lee, head of the network, the flagship platform Manta Atlantic has more than 200,000 unique addresses and over 100,000 users who have completed the verification process.

Lee added that privacy is maintained through staking tokens issued to users based on their holdings on platforms such as Binance.

The Manta Pacific testnet already hosts several ZK applications. Among them: online poker zkHoldEm, the data-storage-and-verification protocol zkMe, and the verification platform zkPass.

Back in March, Scroll, a Layer-2 network for Ethereum scaling using ZK-Rollups, raised $50 million at a $1.8 billion valuation.

In July, the ZK-based virtual-machine startup RISC Zero closed a funding round of $40 million.