Octra to hold $20 million public token sale on Sonar at $200 million valuation
Octra Labs, the association behind the privacy-focused blockchain project Octra, will hold a public token sale on Sonar by Echo — the initial coin offering (ICO) platform founded by Jordan "Cobie" Fish and recently acquired by Coinbase — on Dec. 18.The one-week sale aims to raise $20 million by selling 10% of the OCT token supply at a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $200 million, Octra said Tuesday. The sale will use a fixed-price, commitment-style format in which any number of participants can deposit funds and receive tokens pro rata, with the design meant to maximize decentralization.Octra said the sale allocation could increase if demand is high. Any unsold tokens will be burned. All tokens sold will be unlocked and distributed shortly after the sale, following a format inspired by Ethereum’s 2014 ICO, Octra said.The $200 million valuation is double that of Octra’s previous raise on Echo, in which it raised $4 million earlier this year, co-founder Alex told The Block. Octra also raised a $4 million pre-seed round from investors including Big Brain Holdings, Finality Capital Partners, Karatage, and Presto Labs.Early investors hold 18% of the OCT supply, Octra Labs holds 15%, and 67% goes to the community — including early users, validators, grants, Echo participants and ICO buyers. No investor holds more than 3% of tokens, Octra said.Octra's ICO arrives amid renewed interest in privacyOctra’s public sale comes as the crypto industry turns its attention back to privacy tech. Zcash’s price has surged recently, Ethereum has introduced a new privacy roadmap, Aztec’s community sale raised $60 million, and Zama recently closed a $57 million Series B at a valuation above $1 billion.Last month, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin unveiled new details about Kohaku, a suite of privacy-preserving tools for the Ethereum ecosystem, noting that Ethereum “is still behind” on user privacy and needs coordinated effort to improve.Alex said privacy today resembles the early days of zero-knowledge technology in 2020–2021. “Privacy was underfunded and dismissed for a long period of time after Tornado Cash and a global government push against it, so only a handful of teams were building, luckily including Octra," he said.What Octra is buildingFounded in 2021, Octra says it has developed its own fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) technology from scratch — a key differentiator, Alex said, from competitors like Zama and Fhenix. FHE, considered the "holy grail" of cryptography, allows computations on encrypted data without decrypting it, potentially enabling programmable privacy for a wide range of applications.Octra said its blockchain network functions both as a standalone Layer 1 and a decentralized co-processor for ecosystems such as Ethereum and Solana. It aims to provide “privacy on demand” for private DeFi, dark pools, AI training and inference, and other sensitive data use cases.Asked how Octra differs from other FHE teams, Alex said: "Zama is a co-processor for Ethereum and Solana and not a standalone encrypted network. Fhenix and Inco are originally Layer 1/ Layer 2 networks built using a technology licensed from Zama. Octra developed its own technology entirely from scratch."The Octra network has been live since June 2025 with basic functions such as wallet generation, balance encryption, and encrypted token transfers. Octra said the network processed more than 100 million transactions across 1.5 million accounts during the testing phase, with peak throughput of 17,000 transactions per second and no downtime. A $100,000 bug bounty and hackathon to decrypt a wallet with funds was recently announced.Octra said its current testnet will transition to mainnet before the ICO in the "coming days" with basic blockchain functionality. A major upgrade to add developer tools for programmable privacy and integrations with Ethereum and Solana, including full Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility, will be released in Q1 2026.Team and structureOctra Labs is based in Zug, Switzerland, with team members also in Dubai and London, Alex said. The association has a 17-person core team and plans to remain lean by attracting open-source contributors through grants and bounties, he added. Alex said his co-founder, David, previously worked as a database lead in the original VK (Vkontakte) engineering team under Pavel Durov before Durov left the company and later founded Telegram. Several front-end developers, back-end developers, and researchers at Octra are also former VK or Telegram contributors, Alex said.Alex and David use mononyms publicly but are fully disclosed to investors and regulators, he said. Funds from the ICO public sale will go to Octra Labs as treasury for post-launch ecosystem development, similar to other crypto foundations, Alex said.Notably, earlier today, blockchain analytics firm Arkham said it had deanonymized more than half of Zcash transactions. In contrast, Alex said OCT tokens distributed through Sonar will remain encrypted unless buyers explicitly choose to decrypt them — a feature enabled by Octra’s FHE system.“Outside observers and node operators cannot see this data,” he said. “With ZK or TEE [zero-knowledge proofs or trusted execution environments that are other privacy technologies], outside observers can’t see it, but validators can."The Funding newsletter: Stay on top of the latest crypto VC funding and M&A deals, news, and trends with my free bi-monthly newsletter, The Funding. Sign up here!Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. 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