Taiko secures $37M to develop web3 infrastructure for an internet free from censorship

Amidst the speculation and volatility in the crypto landscape, there exists a group of individuals who champion blockchain’s potential to decentralize various aspects of human activities for societal benefit. Among them is Daniel Wang, the founder of Taiko.

Wang, a serial entrepreneur, initially aimed to introduce decentralization to social platforms. He believes that decentralized networks, facilitated by blockchains, offer resistance to censorship through distributed data storage and community-driven content moderation.

Expressing his vision, Wang stated at an Ethereum developer conference in November, “I hope the next generation can grow up being free and able to say anything on the internet. There won’t be progress if there is no freedom to criticize.”

Originally planning to build his decentralized app on Ethereum, Wang encountered limitations. Despite Ethereum’s popularity among developers for its ability to execute smart contracts, he found Ethereum’s “layer 2” solutions lacking true decentralization after extensive research.

“It’s problematic to create decentralized apps on centralized blockchains,” Wang mentioned in a follow-up email interview.

One significant challenge with Ethereum is its limited transaction processing capacity, currently hovering around 15 transactions per second. This limitation renders Ethereum impractical for many applications. In response, “rollups” have emerged as a layer 2 solution. Rollups alleviate Ethereum’s congestion by transferring transactions to secondary chains and subsequently consolidating them back to the main chain in batches, thereby reducing network congestion and transaction fees.