QED Secures $3 Million in Funding to Propel Fully Trustless Zero-Knowledge Applications Across the Bitcoin Ecosystem

QED, the world’s first zk-Native blockchain protocol, announced today it has raised $3 million in a funding round led by Arrington Capital with participation from several prominent venture capital firms and companies including Starkware, Draper Dragon, Blockchain Builders Fund, Lbk Labs, Paper Ventures, Valhalla Capital, Edessa Capital and Anagram Ltd. QED aims to revolutionize Bitcoin by combining the scalability of Zero-Knowledge (ZK) Proofs with the liquidity and security of Bitcoin (BTC).

QED’s cutting-edge technology, developed by the pioneering team that implemented modular arithmetic in TapScript, is a unique approach to empowering more applications for BTC. Decentralized applications built on QED can locally prove transactions, providing users with unlimited computation for a fixed gas fee. This innovative method ensures that every user’s public key functions as a custom ZK circuit, featuring ‘smart signatures’ that can be read from state, resembling a smart contract.

“Bitcoin has traditionally lagged behind other blockchain protocols due to its lack of support for smart contracts and decentralized applications. But we believe it has the power to be far more than just gold – it can be the foundation of the entire decentralized economy,” said Carter Jack Feldman, Founder of QED. “QED will be the execution layer of Bitcoin, combining the power of ZK proofs to enable functionality like smart contracts and DeFi with the full security of a Bitcoin. We’re pioneering a new frontier for decentralized applications that can take advantage of the liquidity of $1.01 trillion and growing Bitcoin market cap.”

QED is designed to address many of the current shortcomings in Web3, including the challenges of building on blockchain, scalability issues, and poor user experience. As the world’s first horizontally scalable blockchain, it benefits from increased throughput due to a greater number of network nodes and allows any Web2 developer to write a QED smart contract using popular programming languages Javascript and Python.

With the QED’s Dapen Web IDE (integrated development environment), developers can build in mere seconds before deploying their smart contracts to the QED protocol. A key feature of this protocol is its end-to-end Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) recursive verification, ranging from local transaction proof to final block proof. This makes QED highly secure and versatile, the perfect execution layer for all blockchains and zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs).

“We thrive on supporting exceptional teams and QED stands out as one that will accomplish much for the Web3 ecosystem. We believe QED is poised to reinvent what is possible with Bitcoin as it empowers developers, a crucial group in the ongoing expansion of the Bitcoin ecosystem,” said Michael Arrington of Arrington Capital. “With a distinctive approach to securely scaling horizontally with a TPS that increases with usage, QED will ignite a new wave of smart contract usage and applications that we believe people who are native and new to web3 are more than ready for.”

QED supports all Layer-1 chains and WebAuthn Wallets, while accommodating current zkVMs and boasting the capability to facilitate millions of User Operations per second (UOPS). Its robust security model ensures high censorship resistance and immunity to front-running.

QED has an ambitious roadmap for 2024. This includes the Testnet for the decentralized proving network early in the year, followed swiftly by the QED mainnet and a token event.

About QED

QED is Bitcoin’s native execution layer, designed to address the challenges of Web3 development. The horizontally scalable, secure, and user-friendly platform is built for developers and users alike, supporting a wide range of applications from DeFi to NFTs and beyond. For more information, visit https://qedprotocol.com/.