Ethereum
Fhenix Raises $15M Series A to Confidentially Bring to the Ethereum Blockchain
Fhenix, which is developing a privacy-enabled Layer 2 blockchain powered by fully homomorphic encryption, announced the closing of a $15 million round of fundraising led by Hack VC with participation from Dao5, Amber Group, Primitive, GSR, Collider and Stake Capital, among others. This brings the project’s total funding to date to $22 million. The company plans to use these funds to support the initial phase of its open test network, dubbed Helium, which will allow developers to deploy smart contracts on the Fhenix network for the first time.
Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is a new form of cryptography that allows data to be blindly calculated without ever needing to be decrypted. Fhenix is the first blockchain to natively integrate FHE to provide an EVM-enabled smart contract platform that allows developers to encrypt all or part of their Solidity-based applications using familiar tools without any prior knowledge of FHE encryption.
“My life’s work has been researching secure computing with the goal of bringing on-chain privacy. After exploring all available technical solutions to this problem, I have come to the conclusion that FHE is the best possible solution “The launch of the Fhenix testnet is an important step towards bringing crypto computing to chain,” said Guy Zyskind, co-founder of Fhenix.
Fhenix recently announced a technical partnership with EigenLayer around the development of FHE coprocessors, which allow host chains – whether Ethereum itself, L2 or L3 – to assign specific computational tasks to a designated processor, thus allowing developers of any EVM-compatible chain to integrate encrypted calculation into their application logic.
“After scaling, privacy is the next major hurdle Ethereum must resolve to achieve widespread adoption. FHE is the most elegant solution to the encryption problem because, unlike existing privacy solutions based on zero-knowledge technology, it enables end-to-end computation of encrypted data,” said Guy Itzhaki, CEO of Fhenix.