By George Ward
The latest pre-seed funding round involving Hyper Oracle makes more funds available for start-ups willing to enhance blockchain’s scalability through zero-knowledge (ZK) protocol. This funding round was co-led by Sequoia China and Dao5, with Foresight Ventures and FutureMoney Group as participants.
Funding ZK Start-Ups
Hyper Oracle, founded last year, is a developer of a series of Meta applications like blockchain indexing and automation protocol. A crucial part of this protocol is integrating the ZK-proof system, ensuring the trustless transmission of block information needed for all indexing and automation tasks.
Furthermore, zero-knowledge proofs are cryptographic methods employed in the blockchain industry to confirm whether a statement is true or false without disclosing the information’s content. In contrast, ZK-rollups are a Layer-2 scaling solution that adopts ZK technologies, allowing blockchains to validate transactions at low costs and faster.
Meanwhile, Hyper Oracle is among several ZK start-ups raising funds to expand the ZK ecosystem and increase its proofs. Other ZK start-ups that have raised funds this week include Ulvetanna and Nil Foundation.
The latest funding secured by Hyper Oracle will help boost the firm’s research and development drive for ZK oracle and blockchain infrastructures.
Crypto Sees Drop In Developer Activity
Meanwhile, a new report from the crypto venture firm Electric Capital shows that open-source software development activity fell by 11% in mid-December following its peak in June 2022. The report indicates that evaluating developer activities is a vital metric for cryptocurrency projects that top industry players often overlook as it provides insights into the future value of the digital assets development phase.
The Electric Capital report stated that developers formed the core of the crypto market’s continued existence as they build applications that deliver value to end users and attract more to the industry. With the number of end users increasing, demand for developers in the digital asset space also follow suit suggesting an inverse demand-supply relationship.
The Ethereum ecosystem currently houses an extensive collection of developer activities, with full-time developers reaching 1,873. Polkadot comes second with 752. Cosmos is third with 511, the 583 for Solana ranks it fourth, and Bitcoin, with 500 full-time developers, rounds up the top 5 largest crypto networks.
Meanwhile, Electric Capital’s findings show that the number of developers in the crypto space, full-time, part-time, or volunteer, is the most substantial reason for how crypto developers are affected during a bear market trend.
The report also added that 28% of active developers are working on the Ethereum or Bitcoin ecosystem as of December 15, 2022.
Throughout 2022, Ethereum developers were the dominant players in the development community. It is 2.5 times bigger than the second-place Polkadot because it hosts more significant decentralized finance (DeFi) applications;
Meanwhile, experts see developers as true believers in blockchain technology because they will continue to have reason to build more applications.