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Inco secures $5 million in funding to develop confidentiality solutions for blockchain applications, backed by investors like a16z CSX and Coinbase Ventures. Its products, Inco Lightning and the upcoming Inco Atlas, aim to embed privacy into onchain operations without compromising performance. Through strategic collaborations, Inco enables confidential payroll, governance, and gaming applications across Ethereum, Base, and beyond.
Why Blockchain Confidentiality Matters More Than Ever
Confidentiality remains one of the last major challenges in blockchain technology after scalability and interoperability have seen notable progress. The open nature of blockchains, while critical for transparency, often limits the kinds of applications that can be built securely. Inco positions itself as the missing confidentiality layer for web3, aiming to allow developers to build applications that handle sensitive information without compromising performance.
Inco’s vision centers on providing a modular layer of privacy that can integrate with existing blockchains, preserving base performance while introducing encrypted operations. By embedding confidentiality directly into business logic, risk management, and compliance protocols, Inco unlocks new possibilities for onchain applications that previously remained unfeasible.
Inside Inco’s $5M Funding Round: Who Backs the Vision
Inco recently secured $5 million in a strategic funding round led by a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX). Major participation also came from Coinbase Ventures alongside continued support from existing investors, including:
- 1kx Capital
- OrangeDAO
- South Park Commons
- Script Capital
The funding aims to accelerate the development of Inco’s confidentiality infrastructure, expand its early product offerings, and extend compatibility with multiple blockchain ecosystems, beginning with Ethereum and Base.
How Inco Lightning Redefines Confidential Computing on Blockchain
Inco’s first major product, Inco Lightning, is designed to offer confidentiality for any onchain application. It operates using verifiable compute within a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), ensuring that encrypted operations can happen at the speeds required for real-time use cases.
Inco Lightning specifically targets performance-heavy areas such as:
- High-frequency decentralized finance (DeFi) applications
- Real-time gaming experiences
- Confidential financial transactions
With Inco Lightning, developers can integrate confidentiality into their decentralized applications without sacrificing speed or composability, addressing key limitations that previously restricted innovation on public blockchains.
What Makes Inco Atlas a Game-Changer for Sensitive Data
Inco is preparing to launch a second major product, Inco Atlas, later this year. This solution leverages Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) and Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to offer a higher degree of privacy than traditional TEE-based approaches.
Inco Atlas is tailored for highly sensitive applications where confidentiality is critical and where even minimal trust assumptions must be avoided. While it may introduce additional latency compared to Inco Lightning, it serves use cases requiring maximum security and is particularly suited for regulated industries.
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Breaking Down Inco’s Strategic Partnerships and Industry Collaborations
Inco’s progress extends beyond product development. The team has engaged in several collaborations that position it within emerging web3 standards efforts:
- Launched a testnet version of Inco Lightning on Base Sepolia
- Worked with Circle Research to create a framework for confidential ERC20 tokens
- Joined the ERC3643 Association to enhance Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization with programmable confidentiality
- Formed the Confidential Token Association in collaboration with OpenZeppelin and Zama to define an encryption-based token standard
Inco has also collaborated with projects like Toku, Tally, and Blocklive to develop practical applications for confidential payroll, confidential onchain governance, and ticketing systems.
Unlocking New Use Cases: How Inco Empowers Web3 Builders
By solving the confidentiality gap, Inco enables a range of new applications that previously faced roadblocks in public blockchain environments. Potential use cases include:
- Confidential token transfers that shield transaction details
- Online games requiring hidden information, such as onchain poker
- Salary disbursement directly onchain without exposing payroll information publicly
- Confidential onchain voting and governance procedures
- Generation of hidden random numbers to enhance randomness in games and financial protocols
These innovations make confidentiality a composable property across decentralized applications, opening the door to building more sophisticated, secure systems on open blockchains.
Why Inco Could Become the TLS of Blockchain
Founder Remi Gai draws a parallel between Inco’s role in blockchain and the role that SSL/TLS played in the early internet era. Just as TLS transformed insecure internet communications into secure defaults, Inco seeks to make confidential transactions and interactions standard features across blockchain ecosystems.
By modularizing confidentiality, Inco ensures that improvements in cryptographic techniques can occur independently of the blockchains themselves. This decoupled architecture allows networks to maintain high performance while progressively adopting stronger confidentiality measures over time.
The Road Ahead for Inco and the Confidentiality Layer Movement
Following the successful funding round, Inco’s next steps include expanding support to additional Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks beyond Ethereum and Base. The organization plans to continue refining both Inco Lightning and Inco Atlas to cater to different use cases, ranging from performance-focused to maximum-security environments.
As confidentiality becomes a critical requirement for more sophisticated onchain applications, Inco’s modular approach positions it as a foundational piece of the web3 infrastructure stack. With backing from major investors and active collaboration across the ecosystem, Inco is set to push confidentiality from an afterthought to a standard expectation in blockchain development.
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