San Francisco-based software development firm O(1) Labs, that introduced a portable blockchain, Mina protocol has announced today that it has raised $10.9 million in a strategic investment round from Hong Kong-based Bixin Ventures, and Three Arrows Capital, with both firms co-leading the funding. Other participants that were involved from the Asian markets included SNZ, HashKey Capital, Signum Capital, NGC Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, and IOSG Ventures, among others.
This follows a previous seed round during which O(1) Labs had raised $3.5 million in May of 2018, and $15 million from its series A round, the following year, from investors such as Polychain, Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures, General Catalyst, Naval Ravikant, and others.
CEO and Co-Founder of O(1) Labs, Evan Shapiro believed that this investment from the aforementioned partners would allow the further adoption of the firm’s Mina protocol within Asia. Dubbed as a “lightweight” blockchain, Mina uses advanced cryptography and zero knowledge proof system, zk-SNARKs to to condense the blockchain into a fixed size.
More specifically, O(1) claimed that the entire blockchain could be kept at a 22kb size, or “the size of a few tweets,” which would allow “anyone with a smartphone” to build on the protocol. According to O(1) Labs, Mina, which is decentralized with an open-programmable currency, enables faster syncing and verifying the chain.
WangXi who is a partner at the Hong Kong-based bitcoin mining and wallet provider Bixin Ventures, said that Mina protocol would help in optimizing scalability and decentralization for Web 3.0, especially since it works on zero-knowledge proofs.
Mina which was formerly named Coda is yet to launch on mainnet. Last month O1 had been in a dispute with R3, a software blockchain, which alleged that O1’s project named ‘Coda’ sounded similar to R3’s Corda blockchain, following which the firm changed its project’s name to Mina.
