You Won’t Believe What A16z Just Did to Blockchain—Polygon’s Out, Miden’s In! 🚀💰

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It was in those uncertain days, when whispers of progress and echoes of the past clung to the morning papers, that A16z Crypto—those titans of modern finance, whose intentions are as inscrutable as the Moscow fog—cast $25 million upon the fertile yet unproven soil of Miden, a blockchain venture carved with the patience of Russian winters from the rib of Polygon Labs.

Miden’s seed round, if one could still call it that, was less a humble beginning and more a parade through the digital Nevsky Prospect: a16z in the lead, with 1kx and Hack VC trailing gallantly, and a motley company of Finality Capital Partners, Symbolic Capital, P2 Ventures, Delta Fund, and MH Ventures, not to mention angel investors bearing names more illustrious than imperial generals: Rune Christensen of MakerDAO, Sreeram Kannan of EigenLayer—one half-expected Tolstoy’s own cousin to appear, clutching a wallet and a frown.

Miden—a name as enigmatic as Vronsky’s smile—has chosen the challenging path of zero-knowledge proofs, those mathematical talismans promising privacy and scalability, with hybrid consensus strewn along the road like apple blossoms over fresh mud. The blockchain, rather than shackling all to a central mainnet, distributes the burden to edge devices. In feudal society, this would be as though the serfs themselves carried the Tsar’s gold, under the watchful eye of cryptographers and auditors alike. 😊

Institutions, hounded day and night by their paranoia for privacy and their love of regulations, find in Miden a discreet confessional: applications that speak in public, whisper in private, and manage to attend both church and tavern without being noticed. Thus, on April 29th, an announcement was handed down with all the solemnity of a Tolstoyan dinner party, albeit with fewer samovars and considerably more zeros.

Bobbin Threadbare, a chap whose name Tolstoy himself would have envied for its tragicomic aptness, assured the world that running transactions on edge devices would finally end those bottlenecks that have plagued traditional chains like so many Napoleonic invasions:

“It allows blockchains to scale without relying on supernodes or sacrificing decentralization, while making privacy a built-in feature instead of an afterthought.”

$25 million, not insignificant even in digital rubles, is set aside for Miden’s great leap forward, with launch expected in the fabled fourth quarter of 2025. (Rumor holds, however, that Russian trains run faster than most mainnets.) 🕰️

Miden: The Blockchain’s Anna Karenina or the Next Great Love?

Sandeep Nailwal of Polygon Labs waxed poetic—clearly forgetting that the road to brilliance is paved with the wreckage of last year’s blueprints. According to Nailwal,

“Miden is what the future of blockchains looks like. With edge execution at its core, it’s not just an upgrade — it’s the blueprint for the final form of blockchain architecture.”

Dreams of trouncing Solana, Sui, Aptos!—one could almost hear the clink of sabers and the haughty laughter of generals. And like any good suitor, Miden plans to shower its chosen few, offering 10% of its native tokens to those loyal to Polygon’s POL. The rest, one presumes, will wait on the platform as the last train leaves the station.

No Chain is Made for the Masses, Sighs Our Co-founder

Threadbare, in another moment of candid lament, declared that not a single blockchain is fit for the ballrooms of the masses. Privacy? Scalability? Web3 values? All shadows on Plato’s digital cave:

“The reality is that up until this point, blockchains have not been in the position to offer privacy without compromising on performance or programmability, which is a major issue.”

Large tech firms—ancient czars in their own right—arrive demanding privacy bundled with regulatory compliance, leaving the doors wide for innovations like Miden, or so we are told.

Critics, always lurking in the ballroom’s darker corners, observe that confidentiality is what keeps institutions at bay—a veritable lack of trust, not unlike a provincial governor at a reform commission.

Remi Gai of Inco, perhaps dreaming of calculations even Poincaré would envy, speculates that confidential computing will unlock a trillion dollars of crypto capital—enough, certainly, to buy everyone at the table another round (or perhaps their own estate in the Metaverse). 🏰💸

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2025-04-29 16:15