Research and development company Witness has launched a verification protocol after raising $3.5 million in a seed funding round led by Huan Ventures with participation from Coinbase Ventures and a handful of angel investors.
The company is led by former Paradigm, Google and Facebook engineer Sina Sabet and former venture investor at Framework Ventures, Joe Call.
The Witness Protocol is designed to issue digital property using existing blockchain technology. In an interview with Blockworks, Call notes that Witness allows people to obtain proofs of their data that can represent things such as certificates signed by two different users.
“That data can be used by any application because they can verify it even if the data is not fully on-chain,” Call said.
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Transaction fees remain a major onboarding problem for crypto products today, with many users unwilling to jump through multiple hoops to test out a new product.
What many applications have resorted to to attract more interest from users is deploying their own blockchain solutions, with cheaper transaction fees. However, Call said these solutions still don’t address the core problem, which is that you have to pay multiple fees for every action you perform on the blockchain.
What the witness protocol can achieve is make these products free to use, by extending ownership and verification across existing blockchain networks.
“The new thing here is that applications can allow users to download this information, while other applications can still rely on it because they know when the information was released,” Call said. “That’s the coordination paradigm we’re trying to unlock at scale by expanding this resource that blockchains provide in a new way.”
The way the witness protocol can achieve this is by receiving hashes from users that represent their data. On the blockchain, hashes refer to a digital footprint composed of letters and numbers that represent a document or set of data.
“If I show you a proof that says this hash existed in this block, then you know that the data that the hash represents must also have existed in that block,” Call said. “What you’re left with is what we call witness data, which is the combination of the evidence and the data that represents the hash that represents the evidence.”
Once this evidence is obtained, Call explains that there will no longer be any reliance on the Witness Protocol as a centralized intermediary, meaning users will have sovereignty over their data and the ability for anyone to verify that data.
Witness Protocol will use this latest fundraising to further grow its technical team, Call Notes.
