Israeli startup Chain Reaction raises $70M to build blockchain silicon
Chain Reaction, a startup focused on building silicon based on blockchain, announced that it has raised $70 million as part of its Series C funding round. The round, which was led by Morgan Creek Digital and part of Her Capital — a VC firm founded by crypto influencer Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano — and also led by Hanako Ventures, Jerusalem Venture Partners , KCK Capital, Exor, Atrides Management also saw participation. With this capital infusion, the company expects to increase its engineering workforce to accelerate the development of its blockchain silicon product and reach the market by the end of the year. According to Chain Reaction co-founder and CEO Alon Webman, mass production of the first batch of chips, dubbed “Electrum,” will begin in the first quarter of 2023.
A Reuters report suggests that Electrum will be a high-efficiency ASIC chip designed with bitcoin mining in mind, an area dominated by companies such as Bitmain, as well as fabless startup Taiwan to mass-produce the chips. had enrolled the services of TSMC, one of the largest foundries in the The company does not disclose its valuation but, TechCrunch estimates it has grown to around $500 million after raising $115 million since its inception. Chain Reaction aims to use its first batch of blockchain chips as a springboard to develop a more advanced level of silicon designed to tackle cryptographic problems in addition to more advanced chips called homomorphic encryption. One would center around a technology that could allegedly allow users to perform operations with encrypted data without decrypting them in the first place. It can have many uses in the cryptographic field and allows more efficient and private operations when working with data without leaving the information out in the open. The company is optimistic about solving this cryptographic problem even with today’s limited processing capabilities. According to Chain Reaction co-founder and CEO Alon Webman, their solution is to make homomorphic encryption robust in practice and have a unique architecture that also understands the compute and memory limitations among today’s processors. We certainly have the necessary solutions in place to make this possible. Chain Reaction expects to launch this chip in late 2024.
