Inco, a Web3 confidentiality-as-a-service provider, has closed an oversubscribed strategic round led by The Venture Reality Fund. a16z CSX led this investment to support accelerating Inco’s mission. The company is releasing its inaugural product, Inco Lightning, on Base Sepolia. Inco Lightning aims to bring that level of confidentiality to every onchain application.
Inco ultimately aims to broaden its coverage by enabling more L1 and L2 blockchains down the line. To start, they plan to launch this effort on Ethereum and Base. This expansion is focused on meeting the increased need for privacy in decentralized finance (DeFi).
Since its $1.1 million seed round in February 2024, Inco has gained impressive traction. In addition to this, the company has been working with Circle Research alongside to bring proof of Confidential ERC20 token standard for compliant privacy. Inco has built strong coalitions with Tally, Blocklive and Toku. These partnerships will fuel breakthrough use cases such as confidential on-chain voting, private event ticketing, and secure employee payroll.
According to Paradigm’s research, the lack of privacy is a key barrier for TradFi firms contemplating a move into DeFi. This challenge aside though, two-thirds of these firms are showing strong interest and initiative in finding ways to leverage decentralized finance. Inco’s new, greener technology would help to level the playing field. Path is building confidentiality solutions for traditional and decentralized financial institutions.
"Confidentiality is a key missing piece before crypto can go mainstream. Transparency of public blockchain today is a bug, not a feature. We've been looking for investments in this space for years, and we are honored to partner with Inco to help bring confidentiality to the broader crypto market," - Wei Dai, Research Partner at 1kx Capital.
Inco Lightning provisions high-speed confidentiality across networks as varied as Ethereum’s Layer 2 Base. The product is designed exclusively to bring privacy to any onchain app.
"After solving issues like scalability and chain abstraction, confidentiality remains the final challenge for blockchains. Just as SSL/TLS transformed the internet by making secure and encrypted communication the standard, Inco introduces a new paradigm of confidentiality for blockchains, empowering applications to embed privacy directly into business logic, risk management, and compliance. Incorporating privacy as a separate modular layer preserves the performance of the base protocol while allowing cryptographic techniques to be upgraded independently over time without disruption.” - Remi Gai, Founder of Inco.
As 1kx Capital’s Research Partner, Wei Dai, recently reiterated, Inco has a clear first-mover advantage to capture the climate-driven demand coming into the market. 1kx Capital is proud to be partnered with Inco to bring confidentiality to the larger crypto market.
