Miden raises $25M from a16z crypto, 1kx, and HackVC to Build the Edge Blockchain

Today, Polygon Labs is pleased to announce that Miden has been successfully incubated from the Agglayer Breakout Program, spinning off into a $25 million seed round, led by a16z crypto, 1kx and Hack VC, with participation from Finality Capital Partners, Symbolic Capital, P2 Ventures, Delta Fund, MH Ventures, and select angels including Rune Christensen from MakerDAO, Avery Ching from Aptos, and Sreeram Kannan from EigenLayer. 

Led by Bobbin Threadbare, Domink Schmid, and Azeem Khan, Miden joins Sui and Aptos as a web3 project with leadership that formerly worked on the blockchain team at Facebook (now Meta).

Miden joins Privado ID as a successfully incubated Agglayer Breakout project, alongside a forthcoming [redacted] DeFi chain. With planned Agglayer connection, Miden will help bootstrap network effects and, like other graduates of the Agglayer Breakout Program, is expected to airdrop around 10% of native tokens to POL stakers to incentivize POL staker support on the Agglayer.

Miden will continue its evolution to become a ZK-powered “edge” blockchain that moves execution and state to the client-side. Unlike traditional blockchains such as Sui, Aptos and Solana, Miden unlocks a new, previously impossible design space for builders deploying scalable, privacy-preserving applications. With state and execution pushed to the edge (user devices), developers can now create powerful systems with complex logic and hybrid public-private states, all while maintaining user confidentiality and compliance.

“The reality is that no existing blockchain is ready for mass adoption,” said Bobbin Threadbare, co-founder at Miden. “They either don’t scale, lack privacy, are hard to build on, or compromise the core principles of Web3 like self-custody and censorship resistance. However, with the advent of ZK technology, we can reimagine blockchain architecture and move both state and execution to the edge devices (i.e., the client side). We call this paradigm edge blockchains.” 

Now in its final alpha testnet phase, Miden supports a group of core builders through the Miden Pioneer Program, an initiative designed to onboard early developers and stress-test the network through real use cases. 

"Blockchain ecosystems today have many problems: fragmentation resulting from horizontal scaling, bottlenecks due to a single composable blockspace, and lack of privacy and confidentiality,” said Wei Dai, Research Partner at 1kx. “We believe that Miden is a blockchain system that solves all three issues. It can scale horizontally while preserving interoperability and network effects; individual applications can scale without predefined limits on Miden while keeping state private yet auditable. All of these capabilities are crucially enabled by zero-knowledge proofs, a technology that the Miden team has been a key early pioneer of."

The new capital will accelerate Miden’s development roadmap, from core protocol advancements to ecosystem expansion and developer tooling. 

“Miden is the holy grail of decentralized technology—combining private state, full smart contract support, and real scalability,” said Alex Pack, Partner at Hack VC. “After years in crypto, this is the kind of blockchain platform we’ve all been waiting for. I’m excited to support such a visionary team.”

Mainnet is expected to launch later this year.

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