Kyle Torpey at Bitcoin Magazine is reporting that Ethcore, an Ethereum-based startup, has raised $750,000 in a preliminary, pre-seed funding round led by venture capital firms Blockchain Capital and Fenbushi Capital.
Ethcore intends to further pursue the development of the Ethereum Blockchain stack and assist partners who wish to innovate using the smart contract platform. The startup was also awarded a grant by the U.K. government’s Innovate UK to create a: “next-generation foundational distributed ledger platform for institutional communication, authorization, and consensus.”
Blockchain Capital Managing Partner Brad Stephens told Bitcoin Magazine:
“Ethcore is much more focused on building licensed, proprietary tools for large financial institutions, exchanges, and so forth, as opposed to the more open-sourced, Red Hat approach Blockstream is taking … One of Ethcore’s main value propositions is that they know Ethereum better than anyone, and thus the tools they build and deploy should buttress and catalyze Ethereum as a whole.”
Ethcore will attempt to solve some of the current issues facing the Ethereum Blockchain (and other Blockchains) such as privacy and scalability.
Ethcore was founded by Ethereum co-founder and former CTO Gavin Wood who told Bitcoin Magazine:
“We have developed high-level designs for tackling scalability and privacy that can help us overcome some of the problems and help in various settings. They’ll be implemented over this year. We’ll expect a much more scalable public Blockchain in the next couple of years.”
In terms of privacy, Wood added, “Full privacy is still a research area with some interesting ideas that we’ll be watching closely – but semi-trusted architectures on which we are working will do for many cases, particularly in the area of permissioned ledgers.”
Vitalik Buterin also shared his thoughts on the future of privacy and scalability in Ethereum with Bitcoin Magazine:
“In the case of privacy, the basic building blocks (ring signatures, ZKPs, state channels, CT-style value encryption) are fairly understood and established, and it is primarily a matter of turning them into functional tools that can be used in production applications. In the case of scalability, the Ethereum research team is fairly committed to sharing; we feel that it does a good job of combining the benefits of being an on-chain scaling strategy with the decentralization benefits of maintaining a network that can theoretically run off of nothing but consumer laptops.”
Buterin added,
“There are details that are still being worked on, but [in my opinion] a lot of them are solidifying rapidly; we have a team that is starting work on a proof of concept in Python incorporating many of our ideas for future versions of the protocol, and we plan to validate them there before beginning development for mainline.”
