Polygon spinoff Miden raises $25M to bring speed and privacy to institutional giants
Author: Margot Nijkerk | Edited by: Stephen Alpher Updated: April 29, 2025, 1:43 pm Published: April 29, 2025, 12:27 pm
Miden, a protocol focused on privacy and high transaction speeds for large institutions, has split from Polygon and raised $25 million in a seed round.
These funds will be used to implement Miden’s roadmap, which includes expanding the ecosystem and developing tools for programmers.
Leading participants in this round were a16z crypto, 1kx and Hack VC with participation from Finality Capital Partners, Symbolic Capital, P2 Ventures, Delta Fund and MH Ventures.
Miden, a zero-knowledge project, is aimed at large institutions that need privacy when making significant payments. For example, the protocol could be used “when Apple needs to pay a supplier and people start messing with the public price of the stock because they don’t understand what’s going on [on the chain],” Azim Khan, co-founder of Miden, told CoinDesk.
Khan added that many of these large institutions and investors have communicated to the Miden team that they need a privacy solution that meets regulatory requirements without sacrificing performance and decentralization.
In this way, Miden, which plans to launch its mainnet by the end of the year, gives institutions and applications the ability to choose whether they want to conduct transactions publicly or privately at any scale, while relying on the network’s high speed and privacy.
“It’s very different from most other blockchains on a technical level, and it needs to be different because of the type of use cases and functionality we’re trying to implement,” Bobbin Tredbare, another co-founder of Miden, told CoinDesk. “I don’t think it’s possible to build something like that on top of Ethereum or Solana.”
Miden was incubated at Polygon in 2021 and was originally intended as an alternative scaling solution for the ecosystem. The spinoff came about as Polygon shifted its focus to AggLayer and as the protocol’s overall value locked has dropped significantly since Miden’s launch. There is currently $864 million locked in Polygon networks, down roughly 80% from the $4.4 billion when Miden was announced, according to DefiLlama.
“Miden is what the future of blockchain will look like,” said Sandeep Nailwal, founder of Polygon Labs, in a press release provided to CoinDesk. “It’s based on Edge Execution, and it’s not just an upgrade — it’s a blueprint for the final form of blockchain architecture.”
Read more: Polygon launches aggregator program, successful projects will provide up to 15% of their own tokens to POL stakers
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