Essential, a declarative blockchain platform, announced on Tuesday, August 13, that it has secured $11 million (approximately €10 million) in a Series A funding round led by Archetype.
The following investors participated in the round: IOSG, Spartan, Mirana, Amber Group, Maven 11, Bodhi Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Heartcore Capital, Selini, DCLM and PropellerHeads.
Additionally, founders and angel investors from Celestia, Hashflow, Enso, Barter, LI.FI, Astaria, GlueX, Bebop, Sorella and others participated.
The company will use the funds to accelerate the development of its first declarative blockchain.
What is Essential’s declarative model?
According to the company, the declarative approach involves reorienting interactions around results rather than instructions.
This is in contrast to the imperative approach:
- Imperative – Always follow the instructions, regardless of the result.
- Declarative – Always return a valid result without the need for instructions.
In traditional blockchain design, transactions update state by executing specific instructions, which leads to problems such as excessive computation and poor user experience.
Declarative blockchains use constraints to update state without execution, allowing users to directly control the state.
Pint, a programmable intent language, enables developers to directly control the state of the Essential blockchain, creating opportunities for advanced applications.
The release of the pre-alpha devnet with Pint as a central building block provides early developers with a playground where they can deploy and test declarative applications without permission.
The concept of execution-less blockchain design is now a practical reality that developers can work with today.
“By enabling consensus on state updates without requiring on-chain execution, Essential enables developers to build much more sophisticated and scalable applications than are currently possible on virtual machine-based chains with traditional gas metering. We are incredibly excited to work with Liesl, Simon, and the entire Essential team as they design a chain from first principles, with intents as the core primitive and design pattern,” says Dmitriy Berenzon, Partner at Archetype.
