Ex White House CTO Raises Nearly $4 Million For ETH Scalability Project

Ed Felten, now ex-deputy chief technology officer at the White House raised $3.7 million. The latest cryptocurrency news show that he got help for the funding by Pantera Capital, but what was the reason behind it?

Felten worked under the Obama administration but now he is a computer science professor at Princeton. He is also the co-founder of Offchain Labs which is a company focused on creating scalable smart contracts. His company raised $3.7 million in funding. The main product named Arbitrum is a decentralized, layer 2 scalability solution for businesses. The validation solution is extremely complicated and requires special knowledge to understand it.

While discussing the blockchain technology at the White House, Felten explained:

 “There were a bunch of discussions about how the government might be able to use blockchain and cryptocurrency to build and operate some of the systems that it uses. I found a cautiously pro-cryptocurrency attitude among a lot of people in the government.”

He started his company in August last year with a couple of his Ph.D. students. Their goal was to sell Arbitrum to businesses in the gaming and finance sector. The product offers fast transaction processing and a private blockchain network. The first launch is expected next month which will work with ETH. Arbitrum will post a single transaction on the ETH blockchain and will eventually combine with any layer 1 blockchain.

Felten says:

 “What a lot of people are trying to do, and what we think we do better than others, is to move the vast majority of the activity needed to ensure correctness of smart contracts into an off-chain setting, while at the same time providing strong guarantees of correctness.That’s really the challenge all of these systems face.”

When the business that uses Arbitrum wants to launch a set of contracts, it must choose a set of validators. The product offers ‘’any trust guarantee’’ so if one validator is honest, the contract will proceed to function correctly.

If everything goes according to plan, Felten’s project will run faster than any other.