Sovereign Labs has raised $7.4 million in seed funding led by Haun Ventures, co-founders Preston Evans and Cem Özer told TechCrunch.
start up is building an “open and interconnected rollup ecosystem” with a software development kit (SDK) to provide a framework for secure and interoperable zero-knowledge rollups (ZK-rollups).
“Sovereign’s goal has always been to scale [blockchains] simple,” Özer said. “For people who have been in this space for over four years, it’s pretty clear that rollups and ZK-rollups are the way to scale blockchain to the masses.”
A roll up it’s 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. Rollups can be used to support different use cases such as tokens, NFTs, smart contracts, etc., but they are cheaper to run because they outsource transactions.
The capital will be used to build its SDK and hire protocol engineers and researchers with experience in blockchain and its frameworks, Özer said. His SDK wants to help Rust (and eventually C++) developers use ZK technology on any blockchain without having to be crypto experts, both co-founders said.
Some of the largest ZK-rollup blockchains in existence today include Polygon, zkSync, and StarkWare’s StarkNet platform, which aim to increase scalability and security for off-chain developers through higher speeds. and lower fees before combining them and sending them to Ethereum. Ethereum-focused ZK-rollup projects like dYdX, Sorare, and Immutable are also working to scale the space and improve user experiences across other areas like decentralized exchanges, dApps, and gaming.
“Without scaling, current blockchain systems are unusable,” Özer said. “By the time an app adapts to the product market and there is demand, the fees skyrocket and it becomes unusable. […] applications have to figure out how to be scalable.”
Most ZK-rollup solutions are standalone products built by and for the teams that work on them, Özer said. Sovereign Labs “is not in the business of building builds ourselves,” but wants to build frameworks for others, he added. “We want to give this technology to everyone so they can easily take advantage of it and create [their own] ecosystems.”
The team will work on creating different monetization strategies, but its SDK framework will be open source, free, and “always will be,” Evans noted.
In the short term, the co-founders expect rollups to be widely inaccessible until frameworks like their SDK are developed. “Over time, the SDK products will become accessible,” Özer said. “We expect an explosion of ZK-rollups and that most developers will take advantage of it.”
