Elusiv, a compliant privacy protocol, raised $3.5 Million to build out its development team, fund security audits, and bring its solution to multiple blockchains. The seed funding was co-led by LongHash Ventures and Staking Facilities Ventures and also included Jump Crypto, NGC Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Anagram, Cogitent Ventures, Equilibrium, Marin Ventures, Token Ventures, Moonrock Capital, Monke Ventures, SolanaFM as investors. Several angel investors, including the founders of Solana, Zeta, Notify, Solflare, and UXD Protocol, also supported the funding.
The COO and General Partner of LongHash Ventures, Wei Shi Khai, commented on the recent funding, “Privacy is a human right worth protecting, and has been a persistent pain point in Web3. We at LongHash Ventures are excited by Elusiv’s strong position to address this space with their user-friendly and scalable integrations while maintaining a practical approach to compliance. Moving forward, we see privacy as a key modular layer in our multi-chain infrastructure thesis, especially as more social and identity use cases mature.”
Elusiv – Privacy and Compliance can coexist
Elusiv is a privacy protocol that helps users remain compliant. It develops easy-to-use blockchain privacy solutions for everyday transactions.
All transactions are private by default, and users have the freedom to choose which transactions to make public. Anonymity is enabled with Zero Knowledge (ZK) privacy technologies. If users want to make their transaction data public, they can either appoint Trusted Third Parties (TTPs) to all transactions or create and share the individual transaction’s viewing keys.
Compliant privacy is uncommon in blockchain privacy solutions. Elusiv is a pioneer in this area. In addition to ZK privacy tools, it also builds ZK compliance solutions that increase security. As a result, users can know each other’s identities but have no information about others’ funds and transactions.
Yannik Schrade, the co-founder of Elusiv, added, “Financial privacy is a requirement for individual freedom. However, advancing the adoption and acceptance of privacy-preserving tech also requires capable compliance. ZK and new decentralized technologies allow us to overcome the notion that privacy and compliance are exclusive and instead enable us to form a new kind of symbiosis between privacy and compliance.”
Another advantage of Elusiv is its composability; it can be incorporated into existing wallets and protocols. It functions the same even if only one party opts for privacy or uses another tool other than Elusiv for transactions.
Avoid association with bad actors while staying private
Elusiv keeps track of bad actors in a community-driven blocklist and flags them on-chain. For this purpose, it uses a decentralized network of trusted execution environments (TEEs) to reach a consensus over bad actors. Consequently, they can’t misuse the protocol and gain privacy. The ability to disclose fraud also has a deterrent effect on illicit behavior; the protocol is unattractive for people with bad intentions in the first place.
Virtual Machines
Elusiv will also build virtual machines to allow developers to build their own privacy protocols that come with viewing key features and the ability to block malicious transactions. This way, Elusiv will accelerate the building of privacy tools for web3.
Louis Bauer, Venture Partner at Staking Facilities Ventures, stated, “Elusiv is building the ground layer for more sensitive transactions to happen on-chain. Enabling privacy in a compliant manner so blockchains can eventually gain wider adoption. Their focus on strong integration partnerships will help bring this closer to the average user, while Elusiv VMs allow developers to deploy their own ZK-proofs in a cost-effective way. We are excited to back such a hungry and dedicated team as they contribute to growing and maturing the blockchain ecosystem.”
LongHash Ventures
LongHash Ventures is a leading web3 investment fund and accelerator. The investment portfolio of LongHash Ventures includes PolkaDot, Zapper, InstaDapp, Balancer, Dodo, Acala, Coinshift, and Grape protocol, among many others. LongHash accelerator is Asia’s first and leading accelerator that held nine cohorts and raised more than $150 Million. LongHash partners with PolkaDot, Axelar, Filecoin, and Algorand for its accelerator program.
