Exclusive: Seismic raises $7M in round led by a16z Crypto

This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

Here’s a fun exclusive for you this morning: Seismic, an encrypted blockchain, raised $7 million in a round led by a16z Crypto, with participation from Polychain, Alliance and 1kx, among others.

This was the first fundraising effort for founder Lyron Co Ting Keh, given that Seismic was his first startup. The idea, he said, came from wanting to start his own company.

As he spoke to various app developers, it became clear that “you need encryption to be in the foundation of the chain and not just built onto it. And so we tried for many months to build on it, on the chain, but we couldn’t get any of these nice properties that we wanted,” he explained.

One of the bottlenecks in building on big L1s is creating “apps with investment vehicles that are tailored to long term positions. Apps where social experience is built into everyday payments,” Co Ting Keh continued.

I know what you’re thinking: Co Ting Keh is entering a crowded space, but Seismic’s goal is to solve for forced transparency and limited scalability, two notable problems in crypto.

“Forced transparency [is as] big of a change as limited scalability, if someone were to solve this, and then it’s something that is on the brink of consensus, and not consensus opinion right now, where most people agree that, ‘hey, these are two problems, and we’ve been talking about them for the last decade,” he said.