Blockchain firm raises $25 million to develop third-generation architecture

The Swiss non-profit organization Anoma Foundation has secured a significant funding boost to continue the development and research of its third-generation blockchain architecture.

A third fundraising round secured $25 million for the organization, which is building what it describes as a generalized intent-centric blockchain architecture. The technology is designated to enable the development of fully decentralized applications (DApps) and services, ranging from decentralized exchanges (DEXs) to blockchain aggregator protocols.

Anoma’s co-founder Adrian Brink told Cointelegraph that its third-generation architecture offers more composability and ease of use than existing smart contract protocols such as Ethereum and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

Brink highlighted the development of blockchain systems, with Bitcoin (BTC) being the first generation of scriptable settlement architectures. Ethereum became the second generation of programmable settlement architecture, while Anoma looks to advance the decentralization of existing blockchain-based applications and platforms:

“Anoma is the first intent-centric architecture, marking the third generation of architectures that contrasts with today’s transaction- and blockchain-centric architectures.”

The latest fundraising round is earmarked to support ongoing development and research initiatives for Anoma’s architecture as well as developer tools for the ecosystem.

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Brink highlighted Anoma’s primary design principle of intent-centricity, which enables fully decentralized versions of existing DApps, such as digests; nonfungible token (NFT) marketplaces such as OpenSea and Flashbots; and decentralized exchanges that have centralized components and limited on-chain settlement functions:

“It enables applications that are impossible to build on existing smart contract protocols, such as fully decentralized Gitcoin, Plural Money, Collaborative Finance, Multidimensional DAOs, runtime rollups, or multivariate multiparty exchanges.”

Brink describes Anoma’s intent-centric design as a radical new take on how the industry is architecting decentralized systems, as opposed to transaction- or blockchain-centric approaches like Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchains.

A July 2022 report by Chainalysis highlighted the landscape, with Algorand, BNB Chain and Avalanche emerging as competing tier-1 competitor chains to Ethereum looking to provide greater scalability or security.

Many layer-1 blockchains are modeled after Bitcoin and Ethereum, and power transaction and smart contract functionality.

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