Manta Network developer p0x labs has raised $25 million in a Series A round led by Polychain Capital and Qiming Venture Partners, as infrastructure projects continue to prove resilient during the bear market.
Manta Network is a modular ecosystem for zero-knowledge (ZK) applications, which utilize a cryptographic method of mathematically verifying that a transaction is valid without compromising its privacy.
The company previously launched the ZK-focused layer 1 blockchain Manta Atlantic to offer programmable privacy. The newly rolled out Manta Pacific, now in testnet, aims to serve as a layer 2 ecosystem to make it easier for developers to deploy Ethereum Virtual Machine-native ZK applications.
The new capital, valuing the project at $500 million, will help scale the network, user base and use cases for Manta Pacific and fuel the expansion in key Asia markets, according to a statement. Additional investors in the round included Alliance, CoinFund, and SevenX Ventures.
“We are excited to see Manta expanding into the Ethereum ecosystem, and have doubled down on our investment this Series A round,” said Luke Pearson, Investor at Polychain Capital. “Manta Pacific will leverage the performance capabilities of the modular ecosystem, whilst also allowing increasing access to ZK through Universal Circuits,” he added.
The raise comes as Web3 infrastructure has been an investor darling from the beginning of this year following last year’s FTX implosion. Most recently, a survey by Binance showed that majority of its institutional investors found infrastructure to be the most important investment, closely followed by layer 1 and layer 2 projects.
