A bunch of Chinese university professors and blockchain researchers including a Turing award winner revealed they’ve secured US$35 million in series A funding from big-name investors to develop a new blockchain network.

The team will operate the Conflux Foundation initially as a non-profit foundation and use the capital to support work on its network. The project, a blockchain protocol based on Proof of Work, aiming at China’s tech giants as a decentralized, scalable, dApp blockchain solution, has drawn much attention from some renowned investors.

Venture capital firms Sequoia China and Baidu Venture, crypto mining firm F2Pool and crypto exchange Huobi, as well as Metastable and Shunwei Capital, have funded the Conflux Foundation, developers of Conflux, with a total of $35 million.

With the new funds, the crew will next year roll out a blockchain – Conflux Chain, in a bid to bust bitcoin’s biggest barrier – low transactional throughput with a limit of seven transactions per second. The project is tested to process more than 6,000 transactions per second, which is more than the approximate 4,000 that Visa handles each second at peak shopping times.

The project was co-founded by Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (Chinese name: 姚期智), the first and only Chinese Turing Award (the most prestigious award in computer science) recipient and an information sciences professor at Tsinghua, together with a group of scientists and researchers in high-quality research organizations who focus on distributed system, programming language, cyber security, cryptography and game theory, etc.

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao/Photo credit to Wikipedia

According to the academic paper published by the team this August, the project, by adopting a scalable consensus algorithm Direct Acyclic Graphs (DAG) as a solution to scaling issue, could achieve a transaction throughput of 5.76GB/h, equivalent to 6,400 transactions per second for typical bitcoin transactions, with a faster confirmation time in 4.5-7.4 minutes.

“We need a world-scale cryptocurrency. Bitcoin and Ethereum currently don’t scale, and can’t yet fulfil that role. Conflux’s DAG protocol is very promising, and I’m hopeful it will prove itself a worthy claimant.” Said Haseeb Qureshi, Metastable’s general partner and an investor in Conflux.

In the current bearish crypto climate, there’re still big funds going into projects with potential, which suggests the future is still bright for emerging blockchain technology.