Taiko Labs raises $22 million in funding to build an Ethereum-equivalent (Type 1) ZK-EVM

We are thrilled to announce that we have raised $22 million across two funding rounds and launched our latest testnet (Alpha-3) in our mission to build a decentralized and Ethereum-equivalent (Type 1) ZK-EVM.

Scaling Ethereum is one of the most significant and impactful challenges within crypto, as evidenced by the numerous talented teams looking to solve this challenge, each with varying approaches and trade-offs. At Taiko, we strongly believe that the principles that made Ethereum the default settlement layer of the open web — decentralization, permissionless-ness, and security — must be upheld at all cost in Layer 2 solutions. We also believe that an uncompromising Ethereum-equivalent developer experience is paramount for the success of an Ethereum scaling solution. Hence, our goal is to develop the world’s first Type 1 ZK-EVM, with decentralized and permissionless provers/proposers from Day 1. Furthermore, we aim to do this in a manner that is equivalent to Ethereum in other regards: fully open-source and community-driven.

Taiko’s co-founders have extensive experience in launching and scaling ZK projects, as demonstrated by the creation of Loopring — the world’s first application-specific ZK rollup — in 2017. Our founding team comprises Daniel Wang (CEO), Brecht Devos (CTO), Terence Lam (CSO), and Matthew Finestone (COO), who lead a group of 20+ world-class blockchain developers, ZK researchers and crypto-native operators, distributed across more than 16 countries.