Kwil $8.9m Seed Round Led by FTX Ventures and Blockchange Ventures
Kwil – the first permissionless SQL database for the decentralised internet built on Arweave – has just announced that it has raised $8,900,000 in a seed round which was co-led by FTX Ventures – the venture arm of the global cryptocurrency exchange FTX – and Blockchange VC. The funds raised are set to accelerate the Kwil network’s development and create permissionless databases that will power the next generation of the decentralized internet.
In their announcement tweet, Kwil mentioned “This funding will go to continue building the first permissionless & decentralised SQL database, a critical infrastructure component for the next generation of Web 3.0.”
Seed round participants
Participants in the seed round included some of the most well known web2 and web3 social, data, and venture capital organisations. The seed round was co-led by FTX Venture and Blockchange Ventures. The full list of participants includes:
Moonshot Research
Funding
Kwil will be rapidly expanding its team in order to push out new features that will power the future of the decentralised internet faster. This is in line with their mission:
To provide the infrastructure to power data storage and retrieval for the next generation of Web3-enabled applications.
What is Kwil?
Kwil is a social media and data management solution built on top of the Arweave blockchain. It provides a novel architecture for managing both social graphs, as well as decentralised relational database systems.
What is KwilDB?
KwilDB is an SQL database built on Arweave which has its own file system, auto-bundling functionality, and a data verification method called “Proof of Secret”, as well as staking pools to ensure that the nodes store the correct data, as if they don’t, they get slashed, essentially losing part of their stake.
Proof of secret allows each database query to be only as big as it needs to be without excessive data sizes and transactions.
Open source
In February 2022, Brennan Lamey, the founder of Kwil, announced that they were open-sourcing KwilDB to allow its integration into any other Web3 team’s project.
A breakthrough achievement from the team was “Tables as a Protocol”, which allows developers to define custom logic rules for their databases that in turn dictate how and when users can interact with them and write to them.
By implementing this logic into their databases, they are effectively creating permissionless protocols, where no bad actors are able to write false or malicious data to the database.
The problem with most databases is the same problem that many web2 applications and storage solutions face, that of centralisation. Having a decentralised database, and methods to prove the validity of the information stored within, could be highly crucial to the development of Web3 decentralised apps (dApps).
To learn more
To learn more about the seed round, check out Luke Lamey’s original blog post here.
And to explore Kwil and KwilDB even further, check out their socials below.
Join our
