As the cryptocurrency industry heats up again, funding for new startups is also increasing. Web3 infrastructure company 0G Labs has raised $35 million in a pre-seed round, the team tells TechCrunch exclusively.
$35 million may sound like a lot for a pre-seed round, and it is. “Initially he wanted to raise $5 million to build the basic technology,” says 0G co-founder Michael Heinrich.
0G (also known as ZeroGravity) is creating a modular AI blockchain aimed at mitigating the pain points of on-chain AI applications in the Web3 ecosystem, such as speed and cost efficiency. Competitors include Celestia and EigenLayer, which also focus on modularity.
Modularity allows developers to choose the components they use to build a blockchain system or application. Similar to customizing an order at a restaurant, developers will be able to configure the components that best suit their needs.
“Our goal is to enable any blockchain to perform as well and at a lower cost than Web2 applications,” said Heinrich. “That’s the benefit of taking this modular approach.”
In contrast, Ethereum, for example, is a monolithic blockchain. This means that the data layer, consensus layer, and functionality are performed by only one blockchain. Customization is difficult because it cannot be disassembled. And Heinrich said this core infrastructure needs to be built to take advantage of the centralized AI technology that exists today.
When co-founders Heinrich, Ming Wu, Fang Rong, and Thomas Yao first got together, they talked with other market players and said, “This aspect of data availability and data storage is really We found that there are clear market signals that it is important not only to scale blockchain systems, but also to enable on-chain AI,” Heinrich said. “There was infrastructure that was missing and we had a strong commitment to build it.”
Wu and Long were part of the founding team of Conflux Network, a “hybrid blockchain.” Yao He was a founding partner of IMO Ventures. Heinrich then founded Garten (formerly known as Oh My Green), which provides healthy meals and benefits services for workplaces.
Distributed storage is needed, Heinrich said, “completely distributed, for lack of a better word.” The data pipeline must also be broad enough to be used by many users at once. “That's what we enable. The scalability and storage of our models allows us to partner with other companies that do the execution layer.”
“The investor community realized this was a key piece in this space and very quickly got a lot of term sheets,” Heinrich said. “Once we selected the lead as Hack VC, the floodgates opened and we were oversubscribed 20x. We had over $100 million in interest and investors who we thought could help us the most. We have partnered with.”
Over 40 crypto-native institutional investors also participated, including Alliance, Animoca Brands, Delphi Digital, Stanford Builders Fund, Symbolic Capital, and OKX Ventures, to name a few. 0G declined to disclose the valuation.
Heinrich said the large distribution cap table is consistent with web3 values. “This is a community-driven ethos and initiative, which is why we decided we needed to bring in more capital as a result to get the right partners.”
Initial funding will be used to hire engineers and build out 0G's market capabilities, community, and ecosystem.
And while 0G doesn't have its own token at this time, “we're a Web3 company,” Heinrich said, “so we plan to release a token in the future, but nothing more than that for now.” I can't say.''
Focus on high throughput
The chain claims to be significantly faster and cheaper than its competitors, with its goals focused on high security and throughput (the ability of the network to process many transactions on the chain in a given amount of time). It's about putting it down. He says its throughput will be 50 Gbps, compared to his competitors' speeds of 1.5 MBps.
On-chain AI and gaming require high-speed data pipelines. Without fast and efficient throughput, costs can increase. Current pipelines “aren't fast enough, so we built an ultra-high-performance data pipeline,” Heinrich said.
Just as Amazon's web servers allow developers to launch as many servers as they need, 0G hopes to reach “unlimited capacity” over time and launch as many consensus networks as possible. A consensus network brings all the nodes of a blockchain together to match one dataset.
Reach new use cases
Once the chain is fully operational and up and running on mainnet, meaning it becomes a functioning public blockchain, Heinrich said any Web2.0 application will be able to be built on top of the chain. The company plans to launch on mainnet by the third quarter of this year.
Heinrich said the ideal early ecosystem members and users would need a layer 2 blockchain like Polygon or Arbitrum, focused on scaling the Ethereum ecosystem, and high bandwidth, deploying hundreds of people. We believe that we are a high-performing team building decentralized applications that we plan to use. Millions of users.
We also plan to enable new use cases and things that weren't possible before, such as on-chain AI, on-chain gaming, and high-frequency decentralized finance (DeFi). 0G claims that gas costs, or fees, per transaction are “essentially negligible at this time.”
This will enable more AI applications to evolve and address bigger problems on-chain.
In the short term, we will leverage a number of use cases to support the “hard to solve” things, from deepfake detection on the AI side to building decentralized models to supporting high-performance use cases on the blockchain side. intend to do something.
“We want it to be a public good and serve humanity, and that can take many shapes and forms,” Heinrich said.