Arcium Raises a $5.5M Strategic Funding Round to Launch the First Parallelized Confidential Computing Network

Today, we proudly announce Arcium's $5.5 million strategic funding round led by Greenfield Capital, bringing the total capital raised to $9 million. The round saw participation from Coinbase, Heartcore Capital, Longhash VC, L2 Iterative Ventures, Staking Facilities, Smape Capital, and Everstake along with angel investors including Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana; Keone Han, co-founder of Monad, Mert Mumtaz, co-founder of Helius Labs, Santiago R Santos, Kenny Li, co-founder of Manta Network and Lucas Bruder, co-founder of Jito amongst others. Arcium provides developers and applications with a trustless and configurable framework to run encrypted computations. 

Key verticals across Web 3, including DeFi, DePIN, RWAs, AI, and more, can access our confidential computing network to encrypt specific parts of an application or create fully confidential applications on-chain. Initially launching on Solana, we will roll out a Private Incentivized Testnet followed by a Public Testnet to bootstrap the network and empower a range of encrypted applications before the mainnet launch. 

Leading the strategic funding round Jendrik Poloczek from Greenfield Capital said:

“Technology carries the values of the people. The team's commitment to privacy enhancing technologies manifested in pioneering transaction privacy on Solana. Now with Arcium the team builds a foundational technology that unlocks a plethora of existing and new use cases, that require confidentiality, for Web3.”

Arcium's Origin Story: The Evolution from Elusiv to Arcium 

Arcium is the next chapter for general-purpose on-chain privacy and confidentiality. Arcium is created by the team behind Elusiv, an application-layer zero-knowledge (ZK) privacy protocol based on Solana that raised a $3.5M seed round in November 2022. Elusiv provided users with an easy-to-use interface and SDK that brought a suite of privacy features, from private sending to private swapping. While building the next phase of the Elusiv stack, a core part of the architecture focused on a privacy-preserving compliance system called ZEUS (Zero-Knowledge Encrypted User Safeguarding). Simply put, ZEUS delivered encrypted computation, flagging illicit activity within the Elusiv protocol and protecting the protocol and its users' integrity. Our original thesis was simple: By allowing privacy and compliance to exist mutually, we could scale privacy in Web3. However, we quickly realized this potential was limited to Elusiv and knew the pressing need for privacy and confidentiality across different Web3 verticals. In March 2024, we decided to sunset Elusiv and redirect our resources to generalize the technology behind ZEUS, which will enable any on-chain application to leverage encrypted computation. Thus, Arcium was conceived — not as a departure from our goal but as a natural progression and transformation driven by the growing need for universal privacy and confidentiality across the blockchain space. Arcium establishes an expanded mission and vision of bringing confidentiality to every on-chain application, becoming the global compute network for the decentralized internet.

Speaking on the launch of Arcium, our co-founder an CEO, Yannik Schrade says,

“Our innovative approach melds uncompromised data confidentiality with seamless, fully parallelized execution — a feat not achieved until now. As we spearhead this transformation in data sovereignty, Arcium is reshaping how data is owned and operated across sectors. We’re excited to lead this revolution, making confidential and efficient computation accessible on a global scale.

What is Arcium?

Arcium is a parallelized confidential computing network that provides trustless, verifiable and efficient encrypted computation. Arcium implements Multiparty Computation Execution Environments (MXEs) that combine MPC, homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and more to enable computation on encrypted data. Four key aspects that characterize Arcium include:

Generalized on-chain confidentiality

Arcium opens access to universal encryption without requiring changes to the underlying chain or bootstrapping a new one. Current confidential computing solutions are siloed, causing implementation friction. 

Parallel Execution

Instead of trying to access one shared global state, MXEs execute computations in parallel, ensuring adoption-ready throughput right out of the box.

Configurable setups

MXEs are highly customizable, enabling developers to adjust specifications to their exact needs, tailoring the level of trust, hardware investment, threshold, and more.

Composable Architecture

Arcium is a chain-agnostic network that allows developers from different ecosystems to tap into confidential computing power. This streamlines the development process for ecosystem-specific developers and avoids liquidity fragmentation. 

We aim to make Arcium the hub for Web3 developers and applications to access configurable confidential states that scale with them. Current solutions are limited in either performance or general privacy guarantees. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is currently bottlenecked by hardware performance. Although we are excited about FHE and its possibilities for Arcium, MXEs now provide access to scaleable confidentiality, which even existing applications with significant traction can access efficiently. Furthermore, ZK is hindered by its inability to combine private data from multiple parties, making it unsuitable for encrypted computation. Although ZK is adequate for specific single-user use cases like identity and reputation, expanding to cases that need shared private states like DEXs and other complex on-chain applications is arduous.

Regardless of the type of use case or the ecosystem they focus on, developers can utilize Arcium for new or existing applications. MXEs become a customizable encrypted environment for calling arbitrary confidential computations. Thus, the developer experience remains seamless, abstracting away the cryptographic complexities to allow developers to focus on deploying encrypted applications like regular smart contracts. 

Congratulating the Arcium team on the milestone, its Angel investor, Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, explains,

“Confidential computing on-chain will be indispensable if we fast forward 5-10 years. It's exciting to see Arcium bring performant confidential computing to Solana, catalyzing more adoption-ready applications."

Democratizing Confidential Compute

Our vision encompasses the importance of trust distribution and computing power. By combining decentralized infrastructure and confidential computing, anyone can run an Arcium node, contributing directly to the network by running a full MPC node or simply operating a relayer node. Unlike pure FHE-powered solutions where computational load overwhelms current hardware capabilities, the requirements for running confidential computations on Arcium are comparatively low. This increases the efficiency of applications utilizing MXEs and lowers the barrier to entry for infrastructure operators. Furthermore, applications using Arcium can elect to run their node or set of nodes and even decide what nodes are utilized in their specific computations, effectively enabling customizable trust assumptions. This combination of flexibility and performance makes Arcium unique, providing on-chain applications with a confidential computing solution that can scale. 

Keone Hon, another angel investor, co-founder and CEO of Monad says,

“Arcium’s approach to confidential computing mirrors some of the core values driving Monad. As confidential compute emerges as a must-have for blockchains, its focus on performance and developer friendliness makes it ideal to empower high-performing and adoption-ready applications on Monad.”

Arcium Roadmap

Our road to mainnet will be divided into two phases: a Private Incentivized Testnet and a Public Testnet. These will establish Arcium’s foundations by ensuring optimal network performance for developing scaleable confidential applications. By mainnet launch, we aim for an ecosystem that overcomes blockchain's fundamental limitation and opens access to a customizable encrypted state for all on-chain applications.  

Private Incentivized Testnet: The application is now open! 

The beginning of our road to mainnet is here, with applications now open for our incentivized private testnet! We are inviting 200 builders to join us - from node operators to individual developers or teams and even existing applications - to establish the foundations of the Arcium Network. Participants will benefit from hands-on support, development guidance, and incentives to bootstrap contributions throughout the public testnet and beyond. By working closely with the first cohort of builders, we will ensure Arcium is optimized for builders end to end. Furthermore, we want to provide an environment where early participants become essential to the ecosystem and scale their contributions beyond mainnet. Thus, our incentive program will reflect this: developers will be empowered to have functional applications ready for public testing to showcase their solutions, conduct stress tests, and gather feedback. Through this process, these contributors and builders can launch with us and scale their projects for real-world usage. 

The application deadline for our private incentivized testnet is [date]. This phase will last about 1 month before transitioning to our public testnet. Learn more by reading our Private Testnet Invitiation.

Public Testnet

The next stage of our road to mainnet includes the Public Testnet. This phase will focus on building the Arcium community and getting the network launch-ready. Three sub-phases organized into ‘Arcs’ will comprise the Public Testnet, which include:

Arc 1

Phase 1 of our public testnet will initiate the first wave of users to the Arcium ecosystem. Arc 1 will bootstrap the first validator set and introduce the first Arcium-powered Web3 applications.

Arc 2

Arc 2 will focus on Arcium's staking mechanism, allowing users to delegate stake. Arc 2 will release the first round of pilot applications targeting traditional industries like healthcare, research and finance.

Arc 3

Arc 3 marks the last phase before mainnet launch, consolidating all of the last phases into one. In addition, we will host a confidential computing hackathon to find promising applications to launch with us.

Community First: Contribution possibilities for everyone

As we initialize our testnet phases, a core aspect of Arcium's rollout will be building a pioneering community built around privacy and confidentiality. Before mainnet launch, users from across the Web3 space can join our community, engage in activities, earn unique roles, become ambassadors, host meetups, and more! If you are passionate about privacy, curious about confidential computing, or want to contribute to catalyzing the adoption readiness of blockchain, join the Arcium community. Being this early, you will have an everlasting impact on the network and fundamentally advance blockchain technology. 

The future of on-chain confidential computing 

Arcium brings on-chain confidential computing to life. The transition from Elusiv to Arcium signifies a broader recognition of the potential for generalized confidential computing for on-chain applications, expanding opportunities exponentially. We are excited to open up the possibility for builders, applications, and ecosystems to access confidential state - a crucial step for the entire Web3 space to evolve. The roadmap, comprising private and public testnets, aims to foster a robust community engagement model. Our community is aligned by its original values and invites contributions from all stakeholders regardless of technical capability. Arcium aims to reimagine the privacy and trust distribution standard across the decentralized landscape, offering a vital blueprint for innovation and collaboration in the broader blockchain ecosystem. 

Stay tuned for more updates by following us on X and joining our Discord.