Ulvetanna, a zero-knowledge-proof (ZKP) hardware firm, closed a $15 million seed round led by Bain Capital Crypto and Paradigm. The round, which Jump Crypto also participated in, valued the startup at $55 million, according to Ulvetanna's founder and CEO Radisav Cojbasic.

Led by Cojbasic, the firm is building hardware that looks to accelerate the process of generating ZKPs, a cryptographic method of authentication to prove specific information without revealing the content of said information. In crypto, this technology has been historically used in scaling solutions for blockchain networks, particularly Ethereum.

Typically using general-purpose computing technology, proof generation can be expensive and computationally intensive — and that's without mentioning the challenge of keeping up with the many types of ZKPs in development today, a headache for even the most skilled engineers.