Witness, which launches today, wants to make crypto products free to use by extending on-chain ownership and verifiability across existing blockchains, cofounders Sina Sabet (ex-Paradigm, Google, and Facebook) and Joe Coll (ex–Framework Ventures) told Fortune.
“It’s really annoying to have to onboard funds to use a product,” Sabet told Fortune, and it’s these gas fees that are keeping new users away, Witness contends.
Witness seeks to reduce fees by compressing data before putting it on-chain. The platform works by allowing a company to upload data from its application onto Witness, which compacts it and keeps it on-chain for a single static fee, irrespective of the number of users. The data is aggregated into one post that goes onto the blockchain, and that extends verifiability and ownership to all of the data that’s been processed by the protocol.
As crypto products expand to meet surging demand, due to the diseconomies of scale inherent to blockchains, transaction costs only increase as customer acquisition accelerates. As Coll, one of the cofounders, explained it: “Banks can scale as they get more users, but these networks, because of the way they’re operated, it requires the entirety of the network to upgrade in order to increase the bandwidth.”
When an application can’t scale as demand rises, users end up essentially competing with one another, paying fees in an auction-style system for access. “There’s only so much usage that can happen on the network at once, and so the fees start to go up quite quickly,” Sabet added.
As a result, developers charge transaction fees, or make the difficult decision of taking parts of the app off-chain.
“With Witness, you no longer have to make that decision—the distinction no longer exists—because it uses blockchains in a slightly different way,” Sabet explained.
Witness also today announced a $3.5 million seed round, closed last fall, led by venture capital firm Haun Ventures. Coinbase Ventures also participated in the round. The funding is slated to be used to expand its engineering team in the coming months.
Breck Stodghill of Haun Ventures told Fortune in a statement: “We understood the problem well. As users and former operators in crypto, we’ve felt firsthand the challenges of building crypto products on top of blockchains with surge pricing dynamics.”
