Fhenix Raises $7M Seed Round Led by Multicoin Capital

TL;DR

• Fhenix raises $7m in a seed round led by Multicoin Capital and Collider Ventures.

• Fhenix is building the first confidential smart contract platform using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE)

Fhenix Raises $7 Million In A Seed Round

Fhenix, the first confidential blockchain powered by fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), announced on Tuesday, September 26th, that it had raised $7 million in a seed round led by Multicoin Capital and Collider Ventures.

The other participants in the funding round include Node Capital, Bankless, HackVC, TaneLabs and Metaplanet. Other notable participants include Tarun Chitra’s and Robert Leshner’s Robot Ventures. The funds will be used to bring the Fhenix Network into public testnet early next year and to support ecosystem application development. 

According to the team, Fhenix is building the first confidential smart contract platform using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). FHE is a new cryptographic scheme that enables direct computation over encrypted data without ever revealing the underlying data. 

The team intends to advance application development in the Ethereum ecosystem by bringing data encryption and encrypted data computation to smart contracts, transactions and on-chain assets for the first time.

While commenting on this latest development, Guy Zyskind, Fhenix and Secret founder stated that

“Fhenix addresses a huge problem in the Ethereum ecosystem: a lack of encryption for commercially sensitive data. Fhenix gives users the confidence to put sensitive data on public blockchains while also giving developers the tools to compute and transform that data for the first time. The acute need for data confidentiality is rapidly growing, which is driving demand for innovative technologies like FHE and fostering collaborations between complementary blockchains such as Fhenix and Secret to ensure a more secure and privacy-centric future.”

Guy Itzhaki, Fhenix’s CEO, added that

"By harnessing the power of FHE, we can solve one of the last remaining challenges in web3 and allow users to not only own their data but also control who they share their data with.  With Fhenix’s encrypted smart contracts, we can empower developers to use encrypted blockchain as an enabler for new business opportunities, including on-chain trustless gaming, private voting for DAOs, on-chain privacy-preserving AI and much more." 

The team revealed that Fhenix is powered by the fhEVM, a set of extensions for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that enable developers to seamlessly integrate FHE into their workflows and create encrypted smart contracts without any cryptographic expertise while still writing in Solidity. 

Furthermore, the fhEVM protocol was originally developed by Zama, the leading cryptography company building open-source homomorphic encryption solutions for blockchain and AI, and was integrated directly into the Fhenix Network through a strategic partnership.  

Rand Hindi, CEO, Zama also commented that,

“Having the ability to keep things private on-chain will go beyond solving privacy issues; it will pave the way for hundreds of new use cases—blind auctions, on-chain identity attestations and KYC, confidential real-world asset tokenization, private voting for DAOs and more. We are still discovering the full scope of what developers can do with data privacy as a primitive and exploring the full potential of FHE and its applications. Through this partnership, we expect to not only solve on-chain privacy but also spark a privacy revolution through encrypted blockchains. We believe that this is not only possible but, in fact, the only way forward."

Fhenix was developed thanks to a partnership between Secret’s founder and Zama, the market leader in fully homomorphic encryption technologies, and is led by Guy Itzhaki, a former Director at the Homomorphic Encryption & Blockchain Division at Intel.

Multicoin Capital’s managing partner, Kyle Samani, stated that,

“Similar to zero-knowledge proofs, FHE hathers always been a technology with a ton of promise; however, the challenge has always been how to bridge the requisite knowledge in hardcore cryptography and blockchain development. Fhenix radically simplifies that problem and is making FHE accessible to Ethereum devs practically overnight.” 

Fhenix launched a private devnet in July 2023. The devnet provides an approachable FHE playground for interested developers. To apply for early access, please click here (Link). 

Fhenix is the first confidential blockchain powered by fully homomorphic encryption. Through the usage of fhEVM, Fhenix enables Ethereum developers to seamlessly build encrypted smart contracts and perform encrypted computation of data, all while using Solidity and other familiar, easy-to-use tools.