Decentralized data platform Space and Time raises $10 million in seed round

Decentralized blockchain data platform Space and Time raised $10 million in a seed funding round to expand its engineering team and decentralized network to prepare for a product launch later this year. 

Framework Ventures, a crypto-focused venture capital firm, led this round of funding. Other participants include Digital Currency Group (DCG), Stratos, Samsung Next, IOSG Ventures and Alliance. 

The newly raised funds will be used mainly to add more engineers to the team. The company is “quickly ramping up” the engineering team to over 40 employees, Space and Time co-founder and CEO Nate Holiday said in an email to The Block on Thursday.

The team will focus on working on the core database and a new cryptographic protocol called "Proof of SQL," which refers to the structured query language used to manage and interact with databases. The protocol will allow blockchains to query both on-chain and off-chain data in a single environment and get analysis in a more decentralized, safer and cheaper way compared to centralized data platforms. 

The company's database will create proofs of the query results off-chain and transmits them to be validated. Once validated, the data is loaded back on-chain to the smart contracts that can be accessed through decentralized applications real time. 

Space and Time have a long roadmap for adding more advanced capabilities to the database, such as query optimization, multi-tenancy and machine learning, Holiday said. “From a decentralization perspective, we plan to add more database clusters and more validators to our network,” he added.

Space and Time is planning to go to the market for a limited alpha offering in December. The Proof of SQL protocol will be launched for initial customer use cases in early 2023 and for more broadly in Q1 2023. The company is targeting to launch the protocol publicly in September 2023.