Agoric, a developer of next-generation smart contracts and distributed systems today announced they have completed a seed funding round from the Zcash Company, Naval Ravikant, and Polychain Capital. Agoric is committed to making strong security easier to achieve.
The Agoric team said: “Creating secure smart contracts using today’s technology is inherently difficult. That difficulty has limited both the number of applications created, and the number of programmers qualified to create them. We thank our investors for giving us the opportunity to solve some important challenges needed to expand the crypto economy.”
They added, “We are developing an open, JavaScript-based, object-capability (ocap) programming layer to address both issues. The Agoric ocap layer will include robust security properties beyond anything available today, and it will provide that security across substrates, from local machines to global blockchains.”
Agoric was founded by pioneers in smart contracting, language-based security, and distributed systems:
- Mark Miller’s seminal Agoric Open Systems papers laid the groundwork for smart contracting, and his E programming language defined the modern approach to secure, distributed, object-capability programming.
- Dean Tribble designed the negotiation process and contract for the first smart contracting system, AMiX, and has since founded multiple high-tech start-ups.
- Brian Warner co-founded the Tahoe-LAFS capability-based, secure, distributed storage system, and co-authored the prescient security review of Ethereum.
- Bill Tulloh served as a market manager for smart contract pioneer AMiX, and co-founded the Agorics Project for the study of markets and computation at George Mason.