Combining off-chain storage infrastructure with on-chain computing capability, Polybase is building a more secure, lower-cost Web3 alternative to legacy platforms like Firebase, Supabase and Postgres.
[New York] Polybase, a privacy-preserving decentralized database, today announced it has raised $2 million USD in pre-seed funding, led by 6th Man Ventures, with participation from Protocol Labs, Orange DAO, Alumni Ventures, NGC, CMT Digital, Upfront Ventures and others, conceptualizing, researching, and building a new frontier for decentralized technology: ‘Web3 SaaS.’
Polybase equips Web3 developers with the tools to build decentralized applications with trustless automation at a fraction of the cost of on-chain storage. The platform will deliver the performance and cost of a traditional database, secured by the decentralization of ZK rollups. Polybase will focus on three groups of customers:
Web3 social and chat apps that need a decentralized database that’s scalable, fast and cheap. Using web2 databases defeats their purpose, and existing web3 database solutions have too many performance, cost and feature tradeoffs.
Oracles and DEXs that want to enable transparency and verifiability to reduce the risk for datasets and order books.
DAOs that want to allow their members to build tools and apps without the admin overhead of managing permissions and authentication.
Polybase will use the funding to expand the team and develop additional technical capabilities, including completing a mainnet release, funding ecosystem growth, and launching a payment token for its high-performance, end-to-end encrypted Web3 native database as part of its mission to restore humanity's control of its information.
Web3 SaaS solves data privacy and security issues that plague current SaaS models by leveraging cutting-edge breakthroughs in decentralized computing, evolving the model by unlocking data control access and allowing developers to build software that is privacy-preserving and less siloed. As such, self-sovereign data means that information is no longer trapped in individual platforms and ecosystems, allowing humanity to reclaim control of its information.
Sid Gandhi, Co-Founder & CEO of Polybase, said: “Before we even wrote the first line of code, our team conducted hundreds of interviews with Web3 developers. We found a common thread: developers were using IPFS/ Filecoin for file storage, but then using a centralized database or Web2 database like Firebase, Postgresql or MongoDB. History has shown that trusting centralized entities to gatekeep access and safeguard private data is highly risky from a privacy and security perspective. There was clearly an appetite for a Web3 native database that integrated wallets, tokens and zk proofs. Our vision is to become the default database for Web3, enabling developers to build decentralized applications with trustless automation, at 1000x lower cost than on-chain storage.”
The founding team has strong Web3 and data analytics expertise, having led strategy and software development at Cruise, Snapboard, and Apple.
Carl Vogel, Partner and Head of Research at 6th Man Ventures, said: “We are thrilled to partner with Sid and Calum on their journey to deliver the database that developers want. Although blockchains are essentially append-only databases, not all data should go ‘on-chain’ for myriad reasons, including scalability, privacy and cost. Polybase will be a key infrastructure component for Web3 applications and provides the features that developers need, such as token gating, encryption-at-rest and advanced permissions to facilitate community collaboration.”
Calum Moore, Co-Founder & CTO of Polybase, said: “Through our history of building infrastructure and tools at the world’s leading companies, which include Apple, Cruise, Virgin Media and others, our team has developed a deep understanding of developers’ needs. Developers need customizable access control and permissions, along with performance and cost at least on par with Web2 databases. We’re here to deliver for those needs. Our approach executes content validation, state transitions, and zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) functionality on-chain while pivoting storage off-chain to reduce costs.”
Brad Holden, Investments Lead at PL Ventures, said: “Protocol Labs was founded to support key projects that will help radically improve and upgrade the internet. We’re proud to be working with Polybase as they find innovative and creative ways to leverage Web3 technology while reviving humanity’s capacity to control our information and data, through their strong combination of team and technology.”
