Today, 0G announced their $35M series seed fundraise that included gumi Cryptos Capital alongside Hack VC, Bankless, Delphi, LongHash, Stanford Blockchain Fund, Polygon, GSR, OKX and others.
Thesis
Currently, Web3 data is not sufficiently performant, as just a single KB of data on Ethereum, L2s, and even other alt L1s can be prohibitively expensive. While data availability solutions such as Danksharding, Celestia, and EigenDA are helping bring these costs down by separating DA from execution and settlement with simple data publishing, they are not scalable solutions for activities that require performant and programmable complex storage types, such as data persistency, replication, and location, that are commonly found in Web2.
With several distributed data breakthroughs, 0G enables the high throughput saving and loading of state via smart contracts, which enables use cases that were previously thought impossible, such as on-chain AI, on-chain gaming, and high frequency DeFi. To illustrate, with 0G, developers now have the ability to store large inference traces and input data, and run inference requests all natively on-chain with increased speed and performance characteristics. This is achieved through a series of technical design choices, including the separation of data storage and data publishing, a horizontally scalable partitioned storage network, parallelizable consensus layers for independent data logs, and a carefully tuned erasure-encoding scheme.
At gCC, we believe that these use cases will be immensely valuable, and that this merely scratches the surface of the net new types of activity that will become possible on-chain as a result of removing DA as a bottleneck to scaling blockchains.
Team
We are incredibly excited to be backing a team with as high of a pedigree as 0G, which includes serial entrepreneurs who have built unicorn companies, 8 PhDs in Computer Science and leading cryptographers, amongst others.
The team is led by Michael Heinrich (CEO) and Ming Wu (CTO), who first met while Michael was at Stanford and Ming was at Conflux. Michael has a background in entrepreneurship and finance, and has experience building unicorn scale companies, having started and led Garten, a health-tech company that focused on Workplace wellbeing, as founder & CEO from 2014-2023. After receiving his PhD, Ming joined Microsoft Research Asia, where he remained as lead researcher and manager for over 11 years. While there, he developed deep expertise building internet scale distributed data structures, which he was able to leverage in the design of 0G. He is also a co-founder of Conflux, a high throughput L1 blockchain.
The unique combination of experience and expertise of this team has given us at gCC immense confidence not only in 0G’s capability to build next generation data availability technologies, but also to execute on an ambitious vision that will enable new types of on-chain activity that were previously deemed impossible.
Conclusion
With this funding, oG is poised to become the foundational layer for a new era of performant Web3 applications. Their technology has the potential to unlock entirely new possibilities for developers and builders, paving the way for a more scalable, and feature-rich on-chain future. We invite you to join the oG ecosystem and explore these possibilities. Visit https://0g.ai/ to learn more.
Disclaimer
Information is provided for general educational purposes only. This presentation is not an offer to sell securities or a solicitation of offers to buy securities. Nothing contained herein constitutes investment or other advice nor is it to be relied on in making an investment decision. For more important information, please see disclaimer
