Seed fundraising for Elusiv, a Zero-Knowledge compatible privacy protocol, totaled $3.5 million, with LongHash Ventures and Staking Facilities Ventures serving as the round’s lead investors. The funds raised will be used to hire more developers, pay for security audits, and adapt the product for usage with many other blockchains.
Several angels, such as the creators of Solana, Zeta, Notify, Solflare, and UXD Protocol, have also invested. Other investors include Jump Crypto, NGC Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Anagram, Cogitent Ventures, Equilibrium, Marin Ventures, Token Ventures, Moonrock Capital, Monke Ventures, and SolanaFM.
Elusiv co-founder Yannik Schrade stated:
“Financial privacy is a requirement for individual freedom. However, advancing the adoption and acceptance of privacy-preserving tech also requires capable compliance. ZK and new decentralized technologies allow us to overcome the notion that privacy and compliance are exclusive and instead enable us to form a new kind of symbiosis between privacy and compliance.”
With its focus on privacy and security for common users and merchants via low-cost compliance solutions, Elusiv hopes to become a central pillar of the blockchain financial ecosystem. Elusiv will ensure the privacy of all transactions, while allowing users to choose which of their own transactions to disclose.
LongHash Ventures’ General Partner and Chief Operations Officer Wei Shi Khai said:
“Privacy is a human right worth protecting, and has been a persistent pain point in Web3. We at LongHash Ventures are excited by Elusiv’s strong position to address this space with their user-friendly and scalable integrations while maintaining a practical approach to compliance. Moving forward, we see privacy as a key modular layer in our multi-chain infrastructure thesis, especially as more social and identity use cases mature.”
Complete composability is built into the Elusiv protocol. Because of this, Elusiv can be seamlessly included into wallets and protocols, where it can protect the anonymity of its users even if just a single user employs it. This is a major improvement over current alternatives, which need the usage of the same service by both parties. For anonymity’s sake, let’s say Alice wishes to give Bob some money; Bob need not utilise Elusiv to receive the funds. Even without Alice’s use of Elusiv, Bob could make a secret fund transfer to his account.
Louis Bauer, Venture Partner at Staking Facilities Ventures, said:
“Elusiv is building the ground layer for more sensitive transactions to happen on-chain. Enabling privacy in a compliant manner so blockchains can eventually gain wider adoption. Their focus on strong integration partnerships will help bring this closer to the average user, while Elusiv VMs allow developers to deploy their own ZK-proofs in a cost-effective way. We are excited to back such a hungry and dedicated team as they contribute to growing and maturing the blockchain ecosystem.”
Using Zero-Knowledge proofs and cutting-edge encryption, Elusiv has developed a number of novel compliance methods to ensure user security. Elusiv’s most fundamental feature is the ability for users to provide access to their private transactions and assets by either providing specific transaction viewing keys or appointing trusted third parties (TTPs) with access to all transactions. In addition, with the click of a button or two, users may demonstrate to other parties that their transactions have not been sent, for instance, by a known hostile actor.
Additionally, Elusiv’s cutting-edge compliance technology reaches agreement on bad actors by means of a distributed network of trusted execution environments (TEEs). While bad guys have control of their funds, Elusiv prevents them from remaining anonymous. The system’s ability to expose the past transactions of bad actors makes Elusiv less appealing to them, ensuring the security of all other users.
To let developers employ Zero-Knowledge Proofs in their applications without having to understand the intricate cryptography, Elusiv wants to provide “Elusiv Virtual Machines.” This implies that developers may create their own ZK apps in much less time and at much lower cost.
