ZK protocol Hinkal announced that it has completed a strategic round of financing worth $1.4 million with a valuation of $70 million. SALT Fund, an investment fund under AJ, the son of Anthony Scaramucci, led the investment, with participation from Draper Associates, SNZ Capital, and Peer VC. Tal Cohen, CEO of Kraken US, has joined Hinkal's advisory committee.

At the end of every year we come together and discuss some of the biggest changes we’re expecting in the year ahead. For the first time, we’re publishing these ideas. Please feel free to reach out to any of us to discuss these ideas further.

Zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography is rapidly improving, academically and commercially. As new ZK applications launch and scale, we’ll need new infrastructure to serve them.

ZetaChain was introduced on December 15, 2021, by an anonymous project team with experience at Coinbase and Basic Attention Token (BAT). Several former Coinbase employees also served as advisors to the project, including the company’s initial Head of People, Nathalie McGrath, and Juan Suarez, who held an internal counsel role at Coinbase for a decade.On March 9, 2022, the team released ZetaChain’s whitepaper and DevNet and closed its initial Seed Round that raised an unspecified amount of capital. Investors in this round consisted of Dan Romero, Sam Rosenblum, John Yi, JD Kanani, and HwiSang Kim. ZetaChain completed its second funding round in August 2023, raising $27 million from participants such as Blockchain.com, Human Capital, Vy Capital, Sky9 Capital, Jane Street Capital, VistaLabs, CMT Digital, Foundation Capital, Lingfeng Capital, GSR, among others.

ZKSpace is now ZKBase, a rebranding to focus on providing efficient expansion solutions for mainstream blockchains such as BTC and ETH through ZK zero-knowledge proof technology, and building a decentralized cross-chain and Layer2 ecosystem. The official website zkbase.org has been launched. ZKS tokens will be exchanged 1:1 for the new ZKB Token, becoming the core equity token of ZKBase. At the same time, the ZKSwap (Bitcoin) platform and ERC20-BRC20 cross-chain solution have been introduced. The team plans to destroy ZKS tokens on December 30th and open the ZKS to ZKB exchange channel on January 2nd, further deepening the construction of the Bitcoin network's Layer2 ecosystem.

To empower the BTC and ETH ecosystems, the ZKSpace team has rebranded and upgraded to ZKBase. As an infrastructure protocol based on ZK (Zero Knowledge) proof technology, ZKBase is dedicated to providing scalability solutions for mainstream blockchains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin, and building decentralized cross-chain and Layer2 ecosystems. Our new official website, zkbase.org, is now live.

Last month, the o1Labs team gathered in Istanbul, a city steeped in history and vibrant culture. The days were filled with productive sessions of product planning and team building at our company offsite on Büyükada. The momentum continued in the meeting point of the world with a flurry of DevConnect’s Web3 and ZK events.

In our last post, we presented the vision of Fairblock, a core component of which is providing a slate of different cryptographic tools to developers. These include threshold identity-based encryption, threshold fully homomorphic encryption, and witness encryption, each of which enables unique functionality in decentralized applications. Here we’ll be taking a deeper look into all three schemes, their unique properties, and what benefits they offer.

Part 1: An Introduction to FHE, ZKPs & MPC, and The State of FHE Development Today This post was written by 0xZoey. Special thanks to Janmajaya, Enrico, and Owen who generously gave their time and expertise to review this piece. Your valuable contributions and feedback have greatly enhanced the quality and depth of this work.

Decentralized cross-chain trading platform Kinetix Network announced the completion of a strategic financing round led by Factor and Gnosis Chain, with a financing amount in the "seven figures". The team stated that this partnership enables Kinetex to perfect its groundbreaking trading method to transfer liquidity between networks without storing assets in pools and using zero-knowledge (Zk) technology to achieve verification without relying on third parties. Kinetex plans to launch its public testnet on Gnosis Chain early next year. The testing phase is expected to last for three months, with the aim of identifying errors and improving user experience.