Humanode, a crypto-biometric network where one human equals one node and crypto firm Paradigm’s in-house project, today announced it successfully closed a $2 million seed funding round.

Led by Republic Capital, the seed round was supported by others including Tribe Capital, Blizzard — the Avalanche ecosystem fund, Wintermute, GravityX Capital, Shima Capital, Genblock, AU21, and StaFi, along with Polygon co-founders Jaynti Kanani and Sandeep Nailwal.

“At the moment, crypto governance is a plutocratic nightmare fraught with whales and Sybil attacks. Humanode is laying the foundational infrastructure for robust, fully pseudonymous digital identities that will serve as a cornerstone of our increasingly immersive digital world.”
– Alex Ye, Managing Partner of Republic Crypto

To realize their goal of one human = one node = one vote to overcome the myriad of known issues in crypto-economics and governance, Humanode utilizes a consensus mechanism based on crypto-biometric identification. The Humanode team developed a layer-1 protocol that provides strong Sybil resistance through highly accurate private biometric algorithms in close cooperation with Facetec.

“Sybil attack is what stands between humanity and a completely new way of interaction with the world around us. It is not just a blockchain problem. Bots are a scourge of any high-level digital infrastrastructure and we are here to get rid of them in a private and decentralized fashion. By delivering a blockchain based on biometrically verified pseudonymous identities we want to ensure that any systems built on top can be sure that nodes are unique real living and breathing human beings. Thank you Republic Crypto and Alex Ye in particular for having our back. Humanode welcomes everyone to join its endeavors and with rejuvenated strength we press on forward into the untamed frontier of computer science.”
– Humanode Co-Founder, Dato Kavaz

Mainnet 2022

Prepared to launch its public sale and mainnet in summer 2022, Humanode recently launched V2 of its testnet platform. There were more than 11,000 applications to become one of the world’s first human nodes (biometrically verified validator nodes), and over 3,000 were invited to participate, with over 500 validator nodes running simultaneously.

Following the two-week closed beta for V2, the public open beta version of the software was released on December 23rd, and an additional 1,150 human nodes were launched, bringing the number of active unique validators to 1,650 as of February 10th, 2022.