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Inco 2024 Roundup
2024 was a huge year for crypto, for confidentiality, and for Inco.
Inco started with a clear mission: to make onchain confidentiality a reality. In February we secured funding from some of the best funds and investors in the industry. In March we launched the first Inco testnet. And things didn’t slow down from there: we participated in events and hackathons all over the world, partnered with some of the best projects in the industry on use cases with the potential to massively boost crypto adoption, and published research that became a major talking point across the entire ecosystem.
2025 will be even bigger. We’ll continue to build, with more partnerships, more groundbreaking research, and more progress on the protocol.
We will also take Inco to mainnet, so make sure you stay tuned for updates—we’ll be detailing our progress on X and Discord, and in the Incoming newsletter.
Here’s a breakdown of this year for the Inco protocol.
Inco Secures Seed Funding
In February, we announced that Inco had raised $4.5 million in seed round funding, led by 1kx, to build the universal confidentiality layer of the new web, enabling the development of next-generation decentralized applications (dApps), providing confidentiality to existing blockchains, and breaking down the final barrier to the widespread adoption of Web3 technologies.
At the time, Wei Dai, Research Partner at 1kx, said: "Smart contracts have been limited by their lack of access to programmable confidentiality. This changes with the latest innovations in threshold FHE and blockchain that Inco is bringing to market. We are thrilled to partner with and support the Inco team in their mission to bring confidentiality to Web3."
In addition to 1kx, we were also backed by funds including Robot Ventures, Portal Ventures, Circle Ventures, Alliance DAO, Big Brain Holdings, Symbolic Capital, GSR, Polygon Ventures, Daedalus, and Fenbushi Capital, as well as angel builders from across crypto angels: Tarun Chitra from Gauntlet, Yi Sun from Axiom, Fabien from Snapshot Labs, Jon Kol from Hyperlane, Kartik Talwar from ETH Global, Don Ho from OrangeDAO, Kenzi Wang from Symbolic Capital, Will Price, Henri Stern from Privy, Dovey Wan from Primitive Ventures, Scott Moore from Public Works, and Calvin Liu from Eigenlayer.
Thank you to everyone who supported Inco this year.
First Testnet Launched
In February we launched the Gentry testnet to enable builders to leverage confidential compute onchain. This marked an important milestone in realizing the universal confidentiality layer of Web3, powered by Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).
The testnet included a faucet for testnet INCO tokens, a block explorer, bridging, and integration of established Web3 developer tools like Hardhat and Remix.
Events
ETH Denver
We took Inco global, crossing the globe to spread the word about FHE-powered confidential onchain compute.
We attended ETH Denver, where we sponsored the ETH Global Hackathon, spoke at the main conference, and took part in multiple side events. This was a great opportunity to meet the community and get feedback on Inco.
ETH Global Brussels
ETH Global in Brussels was a prime opportunity for Inco to raise awareness about our FHE protocol and the novel use cases that confidential computing can bring in the Web3 space.
As a sponsor, we offered $10k in hackathon prizes, and gave developers the chance to get first-hand experience trying out the magic of FHE for onchain confidentiality.
FHE Summit I and II, FHE Day
Inco hosted two FHE Summits and one FHE Day, bringing together leading researchers and builders from the world of onchain FHE.
The events were hosted at ETH Global in Brussels, ETH CC in Singapore, and Devcon in Bangkok. They included speakers from Zama, Fabric, Fair Math, Sunscreen, Fhenix, Flashbots, and many more.
You can watch back the presentations here.
Hackathons
Inco participated in two ETH Global hackathons, in Brussels and Bangkok. A total of $20,000 in prizes was awarded to the best teams, and we saw some truly exceptional work that leveraged FHE-powered confidentiality to unlock new use cases.
From a confidential token swaps app to onchain gaming applications with confidential dynamics to a privacy-preserving incident reporting app, Inco hackers built it all.
Thank you to everyone who hacked with us in 2024! Check out the Brussels winners here and the Bangkok winners here.
Collaborations
Projects across the ecosystem worked with Inco to bring confidentiality to their applications and build with the Inco protocol.
We kicked off with a strategic partnership with Ethos that enables Inco to access over $4.7 billion of pooled security from restaked ETH, allowing the network to bootstrap its trust layer easily. Inco also worked with Hyperlayer to enable cross-chain communication.
The first projects to achieve new confidential use cases with Inco were announced. Toku is integrating Inco to unlock confidential payroll—a huge accelerator for onchain adoption. Tally is also working with Inco to build a solution to enable confidential onchain governance, enabling governance processes to take place completely onchain without voters exposing their voting decisions to the public.
We look forward to continuing to announce more collaborations and integrations going into 2025—there are a few exciting updates already on the horizon.
Research
Inco partnered with Circle Research on a foundational piece of research into a framework for confidential ERC20 (cERC20) tokens.
This framework would enable users to wrap their ERC20 tokens to transform them into cERC20 equivalents (this framework could also support a mint and burn mechanism). Confidential ERC20 tokens can hide the amount transferred between addresses using FHE, while keeping the flow of funds visible.
You can read the full report here. Thank you to our research partners Kaili Wang and Jacob Hirshman, and to Dan Boneh and Michael Mosier for their advisory input.
We also took part in a workshop with Circle Research at Edge Lanna in Chiang Mai, where we introduced participants to the framework, and appeared on Circle’s livestream to explore Inco’s role in cERC20.
Last but not least, Inco joined the ERC3643 Association to work on the development of confidential real-world assets (RWAs). Inco can have a considerable positive impact on the development of the ERC3643 token standard through our membership of the ERC3643 Association, with the end goal of boosting onchain confidentiality for financial institutions who wish to tokenize assets without compromising on regulation and compliance requirements around confidentiality of assets. We’ve already begun our work with the association, and can’t wait to work more on this exciting project.
Looking Ahead to 2025
All in all it’s been a fantastic year for Inco. Thank you to everyone from the Incommunity who’ve come together to support the cause of onchain confidentiality.
But the work doesn’t stop here. If you thought 2024 was big for onchain confidentiality, 2025 will be even better. For one thing, it will be the year when Inco goes mainnet…
Stay tuned in 2025 by following Inco on these channels:
Incoming newsletter
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