Arcium raises $5.5 million in strategic round to develop 'confidential computing' network

On-chain confidential computing project Arcium completed a $5.5 million strategic funding round led by Greenfield Capital — bringing the total capital raised to $9 million.

Other participants in this round include Coinbase, Heartcore Capital, Longhash VC, L2 Iterative Ventures, Staking Facilities, Smape Capital and Everstake, along with notable angel investors such as Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Keone Han, co-founder of Monad. 

With the new funding, Arcium plans to offer developers and blockchain applications a trust-minimized and configurable framework for encrypted computations.

Arcium is founded by Yannik Schrade, Julian Deschler, Nicolas Schapeler and Lukas Steiner, the team behind Elusiv, a zero-knowledge privacy protocol based on Solana. They have recently revamped to focus on providing a verifiable encrypted computation protocol targeted at decentralized applications in niches such as DeFi, DePIN and RWAs. 

Confidential computing is a security technique aimed at securing data while it’s being processed. Unlike conventional encryption, which secures data at rest (when stored) and data in transit (during transfer between locations), confidential computing encrypts data at all stages. This approach allows for secure and distributed computation involving different entities simultaneously.

Arcium’s technology uses multi-party execution environments, or MXEs, which combine different techniques — including multi-party computation, homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs — to secure computation on encrypted data. 

A trust-minimized framework for encrypted computations

Arcium’s co-founder and CEO, Yannik Schrade, said the project’s approach “melds data confidentiality with seamless, fully parallelized execution” — a feat he claims has not been achieved until now.

MXEs are customizable environments for confidential computations, allowing developers to deploy encrypted applications like regular smart contracts.

Before the mainnet launch, Arcium plans to release a private incentivized testnet and a public testnet. Developers can now apply for the incentivized testnet.