On Tuesday, Miden announced it had raised a $25 million seed round co-led by the crypto arm of Andreessen Horowitz along with Hack VC and 1kx. Other investors included Finality Capital Partners and Symbolic Capital as well as prominent angel investors in crypto like Avery Ching, the cofounder of the Aptos blockchain.
Miden isn’t the crypto industry’s first attempt at a privacy-first blockchain. There’s Aleo, Aztec, and a handful of others that have tried to combine Bitcoin’s attempts at decentralization with the confidentiality of a centralized database. These earlier ventures have often sacrificed performance for privacy, argued Khan, who’s a longtime crypto venture investor and repeat founder. However, his blockchain doesn’t, he claimed.
“I think not having to sacrifice performance for privacy is one of the big things here—and then still being able to have decentralization at the same time,” Khan said.
“Doing something like this five years ago was out of the question,” Threadbare said. “Even a year ago it would have been probably difficult.”
“You can’t evolve existing systems to work like this,” Threadbare told Fortune, in reference to already launched blockchains. “It’s easier to build it from the ground up.”
