Ripple’s incubator, Xpring, has announced that, along with several other companies, has invested in Bolt Labs, which is building technology that would create secure and private transactions by offering anonymity to the network. Zcash founder, Zooko Wilcox, has confirmed to Forbes that his company, Electric Coin Company, has also participated in the Bolt Lab’s seed round.
In a blog post published on April 17, Bolt Labs describes its effort to ensure privacy,
Bolt eliminates the linkage between payments within a channel, using well-studied cryptographic techniques such as commitments, blind signatures, and zero-knowledge proofs. This protocol ensures that a customer’s payments are hidden within the set of all payments made to a merchant and that hubs (i.e., intermediate parties) learn nothing about the payers and payees they support.
The post also mentions that a testnet launched on top of a Zcash fork will be released on the public testnet in the coming weeks.
Co-founder and CEO of Bolt Labs, Ayo Akinyele, said of Xpring’s involvement,
With respect to Xpring, they are building not only XRP, but they also have their own payment channel’s implementation, and the Interledger Protocol, which is a way to connect blockchains, and so they are basically looking to use private payment channels as a way to stream payments accross different currencies.
Xpring Investments Grow
The Xpring initiative was announced last year and aims at “investing in, incubating, acquiring and providing grants to companies and projects run by proven entrepreneurs.” The division has already funded XRPL labs, which is behind the XRP TipBot that now may be integrated into Skype, and which is already available for Twitter, Reddit, Outlook, Gmail, and more. DeFi founder’s Robert Leshner has also had his Robot Ventures receive funding from Xpring.
