Haun Ventures leads Sovereign Labs’ $7.4 million seed round to help scale blockchains • TechCrunch

Sovereign Labs has raised $7.4 million in seed funding led by Haun Ventures, co-founders Preston Evans and Cem Özer told TechCrunch.

The startup is building an “open, interconnected digest ecosystem” with a software development kit (SDK) to provide a framework for secure and interoperable zero-knowledge rollups (ZK rolls).

“Sovereign’s goal has always been to scale [blockchains] easy,” Özer said. “For people who have been in this space for four plus years, it’s pretty clear that rollups and ZK rollups are the way to scale blockchains to the masses.”

A rollup is a blockchain that gets security from another blockchain, so it’s a way to add functionality to an existing chain without sacrificing security, Evans said. Abstracts can be used to support different use cases like tokens, NFTs, smart contracts and so on – but they are cheaper to operate because they outsource transactions.

The capital will be used to build the SDK and hire protocol engineers and researchers with expertise in blockchains and their frameworks, Özer said. Their SDK wants to help Rust (and eventually C++) developers use ZK technology across blockchains without having to be experts in cryptography, both co-founders said.

Some major ZK rollup blockchains in existence today include Polygon, zkSync, and StarkWare’s StarkNet platform, all of which aim to increase scalability and security for off-chain developers through higher speeds and lower fees before being combined and sent to Ethereum. Ethereum-focused ZK rollup projects such as dYdX, Sorare, and Immutable are also working to scale the space and improve user experiences through other areas such as decentralized exchanges, dApps, and games.

“Without scaling, current blockchain systems are useless,” Özer said. “The moment an application reaches product market fit and there is demand, fees skyrocket and it becomes useless […] applications need to figure out how to be scalable.”

Most ZK rollup solutions are stand-alone products built by and for the teams working on them, Özer said. Sovereign Labs “is not in the business of building coils itself,” but instead wants to build frames for others, he added. “We want to give this technology to everyone so they can easily leverage it and create [their own] ecosystems.”

The team will work on creating different monetization strategies, but the SDK framework will be open source, free, and “always will be,” Evans noted.

In the short term, the co-founders expect rollups to be highly unavailable until frameworks like the SDK are developed. “Over time, SDK products will become available,” Özer said. “We expect an explosion of ZK rollups and for most developers to take advantage of it.”