Swiss startup Zyfi, a cutting-edge Paymaster-As-A-Service platform, has successfully secured a whopping $2 million in a recent private funding round. The announcement made on June 10 revealed that this strategic investment is intended to boost Zyfi’s groundbreaking gas abstraction layer on zkSync, promising to revolutionize on-chain interactions through native account abstraction.
Zyfi is reshaping the DeFi landscape by allowing any tokens to be utilized as gas for transactions. The funding round attracted participation from key industry players, including Everstake Capital, Tenzor Capital, Apvc.capital, Criterionvc, NxGen, Majinx Capital, v3ntures, Momentum8, and numerous other investors.
Having processed over 815,000 transactions and benefiting more than 110,000 users through gasless flows on zkSync, Zyfi has proven its efficiency and popularity. The platform has seamlessly integrated with major protocols such as Zerolend, Increment Fi, Pancakeswap, zkMarkets, Libera, and various NFT collections on zkSync.
Zyfi’s objective is to address critical bottlenecks within the DeFi ecosystem. The platform tackles the issue of cumbersome user experiences, particularly when users face gas shortages mid-transaction, by leveraging native account abstraction on zkSync. This innovative technology enables decentralized applications (dApps) to offer users the flexibility to pay gas with any ERC-20 token or have the dApps cover part or all of the gas costs using custom logic.
This forward-thinking approach simplifies transactions and eliminates the need for users to manage Ethereum for gas fees, making DeFi services more accessible to a wider audience. Powered by an API that abstracts protocol complexities, Zyfi’s solution enables developers to concentrate on product development, enhancing user experience and fostering broader on-chain interaction.
Gauthier Vila, Founder of Zyfi, stated, “At Zyfi, we are committed to addressing key challenges in the DeFi ecosystem and empowering developers to create seamless DeFi experiences for users. This is groundbreaking as developers can now focus on improving their products with an API that simplifies protocol intricacies.”
Denys Vashchuk, General Partner at Everstake Capital, shared similar sentiments, emphasizing Zyfi’s role in accelerating zkSync adoption and enabling developers to prioritize innovation without distractions.
The recently acquired $2 million will be strategically allocated towards developing software development kits (SDKs) and paymaster services for dApps. Zyfi also plans to enhance utility for governance token holders and advocate for research on account abstraction across all blockchain networks, including the implementation of EIP-7702.
In 2024, ZK rollups have defied the odds and gained significant momentum, leading to the emergence of various high-profile projects. This surge was primarily driven by the need to offload activities from the Ethereum mainnet to improve scalability and enhance confidentiality. Despite the inherent lack of confidentiality in ZK rollups, some projects have enhanced financial privacy and supported anonymous voting by concealing user information.
The adoption of ZK rollups started less than two years ago, with Polygon being one of the early adopters. The 2024 bull market has further propelled the popularity of ZK rollups, turning “ZK” into a recognizable brand. Matter Labs, the developers behind the Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution zkSync, have decided to abandon their attempts to trademark the term “ZK” following criticism from ZK researchers advocating for public accessibility to ZK technologies.
