Blockchain firm raises $25M to develop third-generation architecture

Intent-centric blockchain protocol Anoma secures $25 million in funding to continue developing its third-generation architecture.

Swiss nonprofit Anoma Foundation has secured a significant funding boost to continue the development and research of its third-generation blockchain architecture.

A third fundraising round secured $25 million for the organization, which is building what it describes as a generalized intent-centric blockchain architecture. The technology is touted to enable the development of completely decentralized applications (DApps) and services, ranging from decentralized exchanges (DEXs) to blockchain rollup protocols.

Anoma co-founder Adrian Brink told Cointelegraph that its third-generation architecture offers more composability and ease of use than existing smart contract protocols like Ethereum and its Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

Brink highlighted the evolution of blockchain systems, with Bitcoin (BTC) being the first generation of scriptable settlement architectures. Ethereum became the second generation with programmable settlement architecture, while Anoma looks to further the decentralization of existing blockchain-based applications and platforms:

“Anoma is the first architecture that is intent-centric, marking the third generation of architectures that contrast with the current transaction and blockchain-centric architectures.”

Its latest fundraising round is earmarked to support ongoing development and research initiatives for Anoma’s architecture as well as developer tools for its ecosystem.

Brink highlighted Anoma’s primary design principle of intent-centricity, which enables fully decentralized versions of existing DApps, such as rollups; nonfungible token (NFT) marketplaces like OpenSea and Flashbots; and decentralized exchanges that possess centralized components and limited on-chain settlement functions:

“It enables applications that are impossible to build on existing smart contract protocols, such as fully decentralized Gitcoin, Plural Money, Collaborative Finance, Multidimensional DAOs, runtime rollups, or multiparty multivariate bartering.”

Brink describes Anoma’s intent-centric design as a radically new take on how the industry architects decentralized systems, in contrast with transaction or blockchain-centric approaches like Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchains.

A July 2022 report from Chainalysis highlighted the landscape, with Algorand, BNB Chain and Avalanche emerging as competing layer-1 competitor chains to Ethereum looking to provide greater scalability or security.

Multitudes of layer-1 blockchains have been designed in the mold of Bitcoin and Ethereum, powering transaction and smart contract functionality.

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