Seismic Raises $7 Million

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Here’s a fun exclusive for you this morning: Seismic, an encrypted blockchain, raised $7 million in a round led by a16z Crypto, with participation from Polychain, Alliance, and 1kx, among others.

This was the first fundraising effort for founder Lyron Co Ting Keh, as Seismic was his first startup. The idea stemmed from his desire to create his own company.

As he engaged with various app developers, Co Ting Keh realized that “you need encryption to be in the foundation of the chain and not just built onto it.” Despite several months of effort, they struggled to achieve the desired properties on the chain.

One bottleneck in building on large Layer 1 blockchains is the ability to create “apps with investment vehicles that are tailored to long-term positions. Apps where social experience is integrated into everyday payments,” he elaborated.

You might wonder: Is Co Ting Keh entering a crowded space? Seismic’s goal is to address forced transparency and limited scalability—two significant issues in the crypto landscape.

“Forced transparency is as big of a change as limited scalability. If someone were to solve this, it’s something on the brink of consensus, not just consensus opinion at the moment,” he pointed out, noting that most people agree these problems have been discussed for the last decade.