Author: angelilu, Foresight News
a16z Crypto has launched the Crypto Startup School (CSS) again after a 3-year hiatus, expanding it into a comprehensive accelerator program aimed at cultivating and supporting the next generation of Web3 projects. This is extremely attractive for startups, as they can not only receive funding but also guidance from top crypto venture capitalists. CSS was first launched in February 2020 and produced excellent Web3 crypto applications such as Phantom, Flashbots, and Goldfinch. Therefore, more than 8,000 teams from 15 countries and regions applied after the application was opened this time, covering a wide range of product areas, including infrastructure, creator tools, and Web3 games.
a16z Crypto selected 26 of these teams to participate in this year’s Crypto Startup School, which began on March 7 and lasted for three months. Demo Day was held on May 25, and participating projects could receive $500,000 in seed funding. With the support and acceleration of CSS, these projects are expected to continue to develop and promote Web3 technology innovation. Let’s dig for gems together. Below are brief introductions to the 26 participating projects.
Blockus
- Weekly Selection | Highlights of the Ethereum Black Summit; Panic over US debt ceiling temporarily suspended; Worldcoin completes $100 million financing, how to achieve its grand ambitions?
- Hong Kong’s Anti-Money Laundering Guidelines: How to Identify Money Laundering Related to Virtual Assets?
- ERC-6551: NFT as Wallet, Bringing a New Paradigm of SocialFi
Blockus is a service that packages and provides account management and NFT sales pages. Its goal is to provide game studios with seamless integration of account and wallet management, NFT markets and pledging, fiat and crypto payments, etc., to help developers focus on innovative gameplay.
Discove
Discove is a decentralized SNS platform that aims to provide users with a simple tool to create personal feeds. Through integration with the decentralized social network Farcaster, Discove allows users to easily create and share their own content sources and build personal interest communities.
Fuul
Fuul is a marketing engine focused on Web3 services, designed to help projects find and manage growth partnerships. Developers can better measure the effectiveness of their activities and optimize growth strategies by using Fuul’s smart contracts for trustless and transparent advanced conversion tracking, automatic payments, etc.
ZeroDev
ZeroDev is an embeddable and programmable smart wallet that supports “account abstraction”, compatible with ERC-4337 AA wallet core, API, SDK, etc., and includes features such as sponsoring users’ gas, batch transactions, and automated transactions.
Primev
Primev is a decentralized data protocol aimed at providing on-chain data for MEV participants. With Primev, users can access and share information about MEV to facilitate development of the entire MEV ecosystem.
ChainBlockingtrol
ChainBlockingtrol is a Web3 real-time security platform that provides false website and suspicious address information collection services, collecting information from channels such as Twitter, Discord, Telegram, and Google Ads, and warning users of phishing risks through reporting.
Plurigrid
Plurigrid is committed to building a decentralized energy system and governing it with digital technology optimized for sustainability, inclusivity, and creating value for all stakeholders. It aims to change the energy sector and contribute to building a more resilient and sustainable world.
Web3Analytic
Web3Analytic is a tool dedicated to DeFi product analysis, helping Web3 products and marketing teams convert, attract, and retain more users through no-code user analysis, and including competitive analysis and other features.
Shield
Shield is a security enhancement tool for Web3 platforms and communities, helping organizations take comprehensive security measures to prevent encryption vulnerability exploits. Shield’s threat detection software can be directly integrated into any platform through APIs or integrated into Discord as a security robot for online communities. Shield announced the completion of a $2.1 million financing in April of this year.
Mentaport
Mentaport is a Web3 geolocation platform that can create smart contracts that perceive physical location and update over time.
Frens
Frens is a messaging application for Web3 browsers designed to provide a better social experience and communication platform.
Bello
Bello is an NFT project holder analysis tool that helps users understand the relationship between NFT projects and holders and provides relevant analysis and insights. It is currently in private testing.
Narval
Narval is a customized wallet platform for DAOs, Web3 guilds, NFT funds, and other organizations that protects, manages, and uses users’ NFTs and digital assets through Web3 native policy control.
Eth.id
Eth.id is a personal Web 3 Profile website that helps users display a collection of personal links and NFTs on Web2 websites by linking “me.eth.id” to Ethereum addresses.
formless
formless is a creative tech lab focused on developing decentralized media applications with the Share Protocol, a digital content distribution engine that uses peer-to-peer, pay-as-you-go microtransactions for decentralized distribution on blockchain.
Capsule
Capsule is a programmable MPC wallet toolkit designed to help developers create wallets with interoperable transactions that seamlessly connect users with Web3 services and enable transactions and signatures. Capsule was founded last year by Nitya Subramanian, former product lead at Layer 1 blockchain Celo, and completed a round of financing in March of this year, the amount of which was not disclosed.
IYK
IYK is a project aimed at creating a connection between the physical and digital world. By linking shirts with built-in NFC chips to NFTs, users can interact and experience digital assets.
FINE
FINE is a Web3 studio focused on generating art and interoperable assets to bring users unique art experiences and interactivity.
Pimlico
Pimlico is a cryptographic infrastructure for account abstraction that provides wallets with its plug-and-play API to sponsor users’ transactions, increasing the number of users for DApps to initiate transactions.
‘mbd the world
‘mbd the world aims to build better AI recommendation systems that are accessible to anyone. It supports users in creating Web3 search and social subscription sources. The AI behind ‘mbd is trained on all data from Web3 open protocols such as Lens, Farcaster, and Mirror.
Sky Lab
Sky Lab aims to provide tools for building autonomous governance chain games, designing constraint mechanisms, and setting value allocation functions to reward developers for building valuable games and incentivize players to make progress.
Stackr Labs
Stackr Labs is building a unique modular Rollup SDK that allows developers to build micro Rollups using general-purpose programming languages. Designed to simplify Rollup development by running the state machine off-chain and publishing the computation data back to L1, developers only need to focus on building the state machine, while the other parts of the Rollup infrastructure are handled by the SDK.
KIKI World
KIKI World is building a beauty platform owned by customers in the future that provides physical beauty products and on-chain products. Users can vote for newly released physical beauty products, including virtual membership passes.
Lockbox
Lockbox is a smart-contract based self-custody solution for licensed and scalable crypto-asset management.
Hourglass
Hourglass is a Web3-native browser that integrates wallets, personalized Feeds, and large language models (LLMs) to simplify the currently fragmented Web3 experience.
Gandalf
Gandalf enables creators to set tokenized gated content, where only those who meet access conditions can view a creator’s content, and supports platforms such as Typeform, Notion, and Substack.
Like what you're reading? Subscribe to our top stories.
We will continue to update Gambling Chain; if you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us!
