Fhenix Raises $7 Million in Seed Funding, Multicoin Capital Led Round

This industry-first confidential smart contract platform powered by fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is advancing the technical capabilities of Ethereum (ETH) with an additional layer of privacy.

Fhenix competes seed funding, raises $7 million from top VCs

Fhenix, a fully confidential EVM-compatible blockchain powered by fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), successfully completes its seed funding round. A total of $7 million was raised from a couple of blue-chip VCs. Blockchain venture heavyweights Multicoin Capital and Collider Ventures co-led the round for Fhenix.

The round yielded contributions from Node Capital, Bankless, HackVC, TaneLabs and Metaplanet, while Tarun Chitra and Robert Leshner’s Robot Ventures also backed the platform in its fundraising efforts.

Fresh funds will be used to support the launch of Fhenix public testnet this year and the progress of the decentralized application (dApp) ecosystem on Fhenix.

Former Intel officer Guy Zyskind, Fhenix and Secret founder, stresses the pivotal importance of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) for bringing Ethereum (ETH) and EVM ecosystems to the next level:

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.

Fhenix’s innovative approach envisages bringing data encryption to the segment of smart contracts, transactions and on-chain assets for the first time in Web3.

Exploring opportunities of fhEVM

Guy Itzhaki, Fhenix’s CEO, is sure that the usage of FHE will solve major challenges in the sphere of data transfer and ownership for persons and institutions:

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 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.

Fhenix network kicked off its private devnet in July 2023. The network acts as a secure risk-free playground for all enthusiasts of smart contracts. Developers can experiment with a new generation of privacy-centric dApps.