Another Privacy Chain! What Makes Miden Different This Time?

Can Miden, which has spun off from the Polygon incubation system, meet the demand for privacy finance?

Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News

After more than five years of research and development, Miden is now ready for real-world testing.

On October 26, this project, which was incubated by Polygon and has now become independent, opened its partner mainnet, allowing partners and invited users to use real assets to test its blockchain, redesigned around privacy.

A Long Technical Journey from Polygon

Miden is not a new project. Polygon announced Polygon Miden and the early Miden VM prototype back in 2021. At that time, it was part of Polygon's zero-knowledge technology layout, primarily aimed at exploring Ethereum scalability using STARK proof technology: allowing validators to confirm that programs are executed correctly by checking cryptographic proofs without needing to rerun the entire computation being proven.

This path is directly related to the experience of technical founder Bobbin Threadbare. He was previously a core zero-knowledge researcher at Facebook and a key developer of Distaff VM and Winterfell. The two projects had different focuses: Distaff VM explored how to generate STARK proofs for program execution, while Winterfell is a general proof generation and verification tool developed by Facebook's Novi Research team, aimed at lowering the barrier for developers to use such cryptographic technologies.

The early Miden VM continued to evolve along these lines: it evolved from Distaff VM and introduced Winterfell to replace the underlying proof system.

In April 2025, Miden became independent from the Polygon incubation system, announcing the completion of a $25 million seed round led by a16z crypto, 1kx, and Hack VC. The project is co-led by Bobbin Threadbare, Dominik Schmid, and Azeem Khan. It describes itself as an

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