Cardinal Cryptography

Cardinal Cryptography, which also goes by Cardinal, builds products in blockchain, fintech, Web3 and cryptography as a consultancy and venture studio in Europe. Engineers, mathematicians, marketers and designers there created the layer 1 blockchain Aleph Zero, and the studio now puts most of its effort into privacy technology based on zero knowledge proofs. The company says it is not a middleman software house: it ideates, builds, integrates and launches, and it follows a rule it states as doing the maths first and the technology second.

Aleph Zero

Aleph Zero is described as an enterprise-ready blockchain built on a novel, peer-reviewed consensus protocol, offering instant finality, scalability and built-in privacy through zero knowledge proofs and secure multi-party computation. Cardinal says it has kept 99 per cent uptime over four years, reached a top 100 market ranking and attracted more than 50 teams to build on the network. The studio offers its core developers to teams building custom applications on it, in fields including decentralised finance, fintech, sustainability, the internet of things, supply chain, healthcare, trading, banking and cybersecurity.

Blanksquare and the Shielder SDK

The current focus is Blanksquare, an infrastructure layer and consumer app that puts privacy first and handles private crypto across several chains. It lets users manage, earn and trade without exposing their financial data, and the studio says it brings on-chain privacy to users and to developers through integrations. The Shielder SDK lets teams embed zero knowledge privacy in decentralised finance apps and wallets, and Cardinal helps with integration design or supplies a dedicated software development team.

Support beyond code

For new ventures the studio also helps with technology design, token economics and financing, and its marketing team introduces projects to the wider community.

Work it lists

Its reference projects include helping Deutsche Telekom launch validator node infrastructure for Aleph Zero, supporting the Kosciuszko Institute at the CYBERSEC European Forum, contributing to the Sovryn Bitcoin trading and lending platform, designing the economic model for the Minterest lending protocol and creating the visual identity of Coinbar Group. It also co-authored the Highway consensus protocol whitepaper with the team behind Casper Labs.

Recognition and team

Honours it lists include a Startup of the Year title from 2021, a top European blockchain startup award in a Companies to Watch category, and one for best infrastructure project. The team is said to number over 40 people.