11/1/22
Berkeley center of crypto: Center on Responsible Decentralized Intelligence (RDI)
Research, Education, Entrepreneurship (bkl Blockchain Xcelerator)
Blockchain @ Berkeley
Co-managing Director: Gurnoor Narula (EECS), Shubhan Dua (junior, Econ + Data Sci)
founded 2016, focuses on education research and governnance Cohort 5
Track: DeFi:
trustless transactions, payment innovation
Oak Network
Chris Li: MSFT engineer, 5 years crypto dev (prediction, gaming desk)
Investors: greylock, electric capital, shima, hypersphere, etc
stripe for web3. providing defi and payment automation Building on Polkadot parachain, mainnet Jan 2023 This is a public L1 to solve horizontal expansion. Expanding to Ethereum next Feb Automation dashboard (e.g. dashboard similar to BofA)
Alfred
Cross border payments. Simply process of sending USDC.
Partner with local bank to do offramp team comes from banking, compliance, KPMG, Deloitte, Western union same day international transfer platform using usdc onramp: plaid, visa, off ramp with local banks, door-to-door delivery of cash Current market US, dominican republic expanding to brazil, chili, columbiam mexico, argentina 8k user registered, non custodial P2P USDC wallet
ViteX
Richard Yan, goldman, two sigma
Charles LIu, JD & Meituan
Cross-chain order-book dex
Saying they are combining security, liquidity, UX, permissionless (pro of cex + pro of AMM dex) DEX volume account fro 10-20% of CEX, 95% of DEX volume from AMM Currently 60+ coins listed $VX stakers have earned distribution of 200 BTC to-date Five cross-chain gateways, with 4 community-run → decentralization 86% have been released (25M / 29M) traiding bots to simplify trading
Overnight.fi
The vanguard of Defi; serve risk-averse crypto-investors
Team from BCK, Morgan Stanley, Google, Facebook, JPMorgan. Russian team
all products denominated in usdc issuing insurance (insured tranches qualify as collateral for USD USD+ and USD+ pools at AMMs basically engineered defi products only need $25-30M TVL to reach $1M annual revenue. 80M in the current. overnight’s moat is the ability to distribute USD+ and ETS via AMMs, with minimum CAC. Numbers cannot see but they say their growth target is organic and growth plan is feasible Looking for 3M seed round
Moon
Ken Kruger, CS @ cornell, columbia (worked on ballistic missile on submarine)
Moon is a privacy-first crypto challener bank and Banking-aaS platform.
focus on card and card issuance, partnership with visa now primary barrier to financial service to the unbanked is documentation work Moon make 1.5%-6% on every transaction Opportunistically taking investors on board, have 30 months of leeway
Pendulum
Alexander Wilke; team half in german, half over the world. Started building in crypto since 2014.
Layer-1 fiat infra connected to polka. It connects Fiat Networks with the defi ecosystem; try to connect tradfi to defi and vice versa
all blockchains on this network (15+ now) are tied with global banking network FX AMM DApp built on Pendulum. Offer 2x lower slipper and fees for stablecoins while eliminating impermanent loss. more check their white paper Now selling 10% of $PEN token for $4M
Track: Sustainability
Bitgreen
building on polkadot parachain
founder ex-Morgan Stanley, investor @ Angelist, UMich
L1 network that standardize and scale the green financial sector Focus on institutional-grade, compliant infra and marketplaces for asset financing and environmental commodities building os for corporations to do ESG on web3 recently won a polkadot parachain slot contracted polkadot offsetting (network-wide open audit for electricity consumption) partnership with GEAPP (rockefella, bezos)
Avatree
Chetan the founder is UCB neuro PhD, team have creative director from Playstation and apple music
Empowering enterpreises to use carbon offsetting via NFT
collab with NFT artists to create avatree nft along with it will come with a 1y r climate credit pack included the tree will algorithmically grow into a tree //bruh this is mayi senlin// Eachtree will fruit and breed token token can be used for real world reward or exchange for cash selling tree $10-100 each selling climate credit packs //price couldn’t see but around $100// sold as an employee wellness program to enterprises Raising $1.5M beta launch Q2 2023
Track: GameFi
Anorra
Team: Columbia background
Treating game as investment vehicle...
quest system: level up users’ financial understanding guild: values aligned with Anorra provide additional value to their users (exactly what didn’t say) Focus on GenZ to cold start Raising $2M pre-seed SAFE, use for user acquisition, community development, development of video game
Curio Research
Game studio that pioneer fully on-chain games
Closed seed round recently; Yale, BKL, smrti lab (Modeo)
@0xCurio
Create novel game mechanisms and social interactions, enabled by smart contract’s composability pro: players can interact in whatever way the smart contracts enable → no longer need to follow a strictly defined paradigm July Demo metrics: 4 weeks, 4k unique addresses, 130k total txs’ sent
Tracks: NFTs
NoRamp
NFT purchasing infrastructure using fiat
Kody Amburgey, tradfi (merrill lynch, seedinvest by circle)
Jorge Trujillo, two times YC
uses a proprietary process (patents-pending) to activate smart cotract triggers initiated by off-chain peer-to-peer fiat payment confirmation. Result is Created a quasi fiat-native digital asset layer creators no longer need to adopt and accept crypto to mint and sell NFTs. Aiming for $5bn business in US, just NFTs can expand to data platform
Anifie
provides crossplatform NFT metaverse for corporates
Yohei Iwasaki, stanford MS&E master, started as lawyer. Serial entrepreneur total 2exits of $365M.
Focus on Japan for initial market NFT is legal (vs US and China) Patent Pending: Crossplatform & Secondary Content Generators NFT + brand nft (e.g. Gucci) → new NFT Software licensing fee $20k per year
Mintplex
No-code tools to build businesses in web3. Build NFT infra by combining web2 and web3
supported by YC W22, alchemy, Quix, etc. Done with seed raise
No code interface and no upfront cost to customer Additional tooling to row and earn after launching Already launched over 900+ communities no KYC, support multiple chain, no-code mint button, community bots
Music
Own and invest in your fav music
NFTs as new medium for music metrics now: 3.1M sale, 2.8k avg sales
Track: B2B/B2C platform
Fairmint
Equity protocol: provable, traceable, stadardized, transferable, programmable
Fairmint is the first full-stack software to issue crypto native securities basically infra for community owernship 11.5% investment rate from sign up 21 community offerings live $19M invested by community sub fee starting at $199/month, with $50 from each investment
DTravel
shopify for short-term rental operators but with web3 twist
team: worked at google, airbb, vrbo, travala.com