Lagrange Labs, a cryptography startup specializing in zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, has raised $13.2 million in a seed funding round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.
The startup is based on Ethereum’s EigenLayer restaking platform and is aimed at providing decentralized applications with efficient and secure access to otherwise resource-intensive onchain computing power.
Lagrange’s flagship product comes in the form of a zero-knowledge “coprover,” slated for release later this month.
According to the press materials, the coprover is operates as an offchain network of specialized nodes that could execute intensive computations and generate ZK proofs based on the results. Such a setup allows for decentralized applications to verifiably access the computations without requiring trust between the initiated task and the offchain prover.
Founder Ismael Hishon-Rezaizadeh explained that Lagrange’s proving systems and proof constructions can scale to “very big-data scales of verifiable computation” that otherwise would have been “infeasible.”
This approach enables blockchains, which are often expensive and sluggish for certain kinds of activities, to run some computations cheaply and quickly off-chain.
Lagrange’s security will be based on EigenLayer, a platform on Ethereum that allows users to “restake” ether (ETH) tokens to help secure upstart blockchain apps in exchange for extra rewards. According to Hishon-Rezaizadeh, some $6 billion worth of restaked assets has already been allocated for the security of Lagrange.
Lagrange claims that they will be working to continually develop their operators and match improvements from EigenLayer’s core stack. The startup is partnered with Kraken, a crypto exchange, and Galaxy, a crypto-financial firm.
Aside from the Founder’s Fund, the recently closed seed round also saw participation from Archetype Ventures, 1kx, Maven11, Volt Capital, Fenbushi Capital, CMT Digital, Mantle, and Ecosystem.