Participated · Equity · Oct 2025

Open Campus is building a community-driven Web3 ecosystem that uses blockchain technology and its native $EDU token to give teachers real ownership of their content while providing students with transparent, verifiable credentials. The platform allows educators to publish courses, earn revenue directly, and share profits fairly, addressing long-standing issues such as teacher underpayment and diploma fraud. Upcoming products include Open Campus ID for verified digital identities, OC Wallet for on-chain payments and achievement tracking, and EDU Chain as the underlying blockchain for course records and transactions. The company is already active across Asia, where thousands of students use its tools for student loans, payments, and credential verification. Future plans call for expanding these services globally, introducing a “financial and reputation layer” that links transparent student financing to verified academic records. By targeting the $5 trillion global education market and the $3.7 trillion student-loan sector, Open Campus aims to make education borderless, auditable, and financially rewarding for all stakeholders.

Participated · Equity · Jun 2025

Variational operates a zero-fee trading platform (Omni) that aggregates liquidity from both on-chain and traditional markets to offer perpetuals and generalized derivatives. The protocol entered invite-only private beta in January 2025 and has since processed over $200B in trading volume, served 50k+ accounts, amassed over $750M in open interest, and shared over $7M in rewards with traders. Its initial RWA rollout (Phase 1) includes gold, silver, copper and WTI crude to validate cross-margining and on-chain settlement using aggregated crypto-native liquidity. Phase 2 intends to route liquidity directly from TradFi sources and expand to 100+ new markets. Variational’s 2026 roadmap includes listing additional RWA markets, deepening liquidity via partnerships, and releasing a trading API. The team includes veterans from firms such as Google, Meta, Virtu, IMC, and Jane Street.

Participated · Seed · Apr 2025

Optimum is building a decentralized memory layer for blockchains to make data storage, access and propagation faster, cheaper and more decentralized. Its core innovation is a decentralized coding method called Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC), developed by MIT professor Muriel Médard. The company invited creators from institutions like Harvard and MIT to transition from academia into the commercial crypto arena. Optimum's memory infrastructure targets inefficiencies such as redundant gossip networks, congested mempools and bloated nodes that make retrieval costly and slow. The offering is live on a private testnet and Optimum is inviting L1s, L2s, validators and node operators to try its memory layer. Optimum raised an $11 million seed round to advance its technology.

Participated · Series A · Aug 2024

AstroForge mines asteroids and develops related space-mining capabilities. The company is based in Huntington Beach, Calif., and was co-founded by Matt Gialich and Jose Acain. It raised $40M in a Series A round to support its operations and development. AstroForge intends to use the new capital to expand operations and advance its development efforts. The financing increases the company’s total funding to date to $55M. Participating investors in the Series A include 776, Initialized, Caladan, YC, Uncorrelated Ventures, and Jed McCaleb. Astroforge is building in-space refining and asteroid-mining capability aimed at extracting and returning platinum-group metals. The founders say their technique requires a high-rated vacuum and zero-g and does not involve landing on target asteroids. The company is targeting relatively small bodies (20 meters to 1.5 kilometers) and plans lightweight payloads under ~200 kilograms to leverage rideshare launches. Astroforge has a partnership with OrbAstro to build its first satellite and has secured a spot on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare for a demonstration flight next year. To kickstart operations it closed a $13 million seed round that the company says will fund its first two missions. The company was founded in January by Matt Gialich and Jose Acain, has four full-time employees, and is hiring for seven more roles.

Participated · Series A · Jul 2024

Founded in October 2023, Bitlayer Labs is building a Bitcoin Layer 2 network based on the Bitcoin Virtual Machine (BitVM) to expand application programmability and tap into Bitcoin security. The team launched mainnet V1 in early 2024 and released a trust-minimized BitVM Bridge in July. Bitlayer has released integrations with chains including Arbitrum, Base, Cardano, and Sui and plans to ship a V2 of its mainnet later this year. The project raised capital through both private and public rounds; the fresh capital will be used for operational expansion, team growth, and ecosystem development. As of this raise, Bitlayer's total funding stands at $29.91 million across private and public rounds. Bitlayer is positioned as the first Bitcoin Layer 2 based on Bitcoin finality, offering a native environment through technologies such as OpVM, Finality Bridge, and RtEVM. It has implemented OpVM, which combines fraud proofs (BitVM) and validity proofs (OP_CAT) to enable Bitcoin L1 verification of arbitrary computations. The project launched Mainnet‑V1 on April 15 and now hosts over 280 deployed DApps across infrastructure, wallets, DeFi, NFTs, gaming, metaverse, and RWAs. Bitlayer reports partnerships with more than 30 Web3 platforms including Hacken, AWS Cloud, Ankr, Polyhedra, Babylon, Particle Network, and Meson. The team is preparing the imminent launch of Bitlayer V2, a Bitcoin‑native rollup whose state transitions are protected by OpVM. The company has raised a total of $25 million to date, funds the team says will accelerate development, scalability, and user accessibility. Bitlayer Labs offers a Bitcoin Layer 2 solution based on the BitVM paradigm. Its core objective is to address the trade-off between security and Turing completeness in BTC Layer 2 through cryptographic innovations and blockchain protocol engineering. The company aims to become the computation layer for Bitcoin, introducing ultra-scalability while inheriting Bitcoin’s security. Bitlayer targets a high-throughput, low-cost transaction experience for users. It intends to use recent funding to expand growth and development efforts. The Series A brought the company’s total capital raised to $16M. Bitlayer is a Bitcoin Layer 2 infrastructure provider building Layer 2 infrastructure for Bitcoin. The company plans to launch its mainnet on April 5. It will introduce an ecosystem incentive program called Ready Player One. Bitlayer announced completion of a $5 million seed financing. The round was led by Framework Ventures and ABCDE Capital, with participation from StarkWare, OKX Ventures, Alliance DAO, UTXO Management, Asymmetric Capital, Kenetic Capital, Pivot Global, Web3Port, Mindfulness Capital, C6E Capital, PAKA, Comma3 Capital, Kronos Ventures, dozens of institutions, and individual investors including Dan Held, Ryan Selkis, and Dan McArdle.