Fhenix, which develops confidentiality-enabling Layer 2 blockchain powered by fully homomorphic encryption, has announced the close of a $15 million series A fundraising round led by Hack VC with participation from Dao5, Amber Group, Primitive, GSR, Collider and Stake Capital, among others. This brings the project’s total funding to date to $22 million. The company plans to use these funds to support the initial stage of its open testnet, dubbed Helium, which will enable developers to deploy smart contracts to the Fhenix network for the first time.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is a novel form of cryptography that allows data to be computed blindly without ever needing to be decrypted. Fhenix is the first blockchain to natively integrate FHE in order to deliver an EVM-compatible smart contract platform that allows developers to encrypt all or part of their Solidity-based applications using familiar tools without any prior knowledge of FHE encryption.

“My life’s work has been research into secure computation with the goal of bringing confidentiality onchain. After exploring every available technical solution to this problem I came to the conclusion FHE is the best possible solution. The launch of the Fhenix testnet is an important step towards bringing encrypted computation onchain,” said Guy Zyskind, co-founder of Fhenix.

Fhenix recently announced a technical partnership with EigenLayer around the development of FHE Coprocessors, which enable host chains–whether that be Ethereum itself, L2s, or L3s–to offload specific computational tasks to a designated processor, enabling developers on any EVM-compatible chain to integrate encrypted computation into their application logic.

“After scaling, confidentiality is the next major hurdle Ethereum needs to solve in order to reach mainstream adoption. FHE is the most elegant solution to the problem of encryption because, unlike existing confidentiality solutions based on zero knowledge technology, it allows for end-to-end computation of encrypted data,” said Guy Itzhaki, CEO of Fhenix.