Participated · Equity · Sep 2021

Moon provides infrastructure that lets e‑commerce sites accept crypto payments and funds merchant cards using bitcoin. The company is expanding product functionality to a web and mobile application and to allow funding cards from exchanges beyond Coinbase. It plans to enable payments with stablecoins in addition to bitcoin and to broaden its geographic reach outside the U.S. Moon intends to grow its team from seven to about 10–12 employees in the coming months. The startup is using new funding to accelerate partnerships and product expansion. Cards currently have U.S.-only usability constraints due to limited personal information collection.

Participated · Seed · Dec 2020

Euler XYZ is a decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol that allows any asset with a wETH pair on Uniswap to be added to its lending markets. The protocol is permissionless—users can activate their own lending markets—and supports multi-asset borrowing/lending and the use of multiple assets as collateral. To manage contagion risk from permissionless listings, Euler classifies assets into risk-based tiers and places the riskiest tokens into isolation pools that cannot be used as collateral with non-isolation assets. Euler is governed by holders of its native Euler Governance Token (EUL); the team plans to launch the Euler DAO to give tokenholders control over development, operations, and the community treasury. The company says the near term focus is decentralization and integrations with other DeFi workflows. CEO Michael Bentley has described the protocol as aiming to remove listing barriers and be a permissionless, Uniswap-like market for lending and borrowing. Euler is a capital-efficient, permissionless lending protocol that enables users to earn interest on crypto assets or hedge without a trusted third party. The protocol is purpose-built to support permissionless listing of almost any crypto asset and to allow users to lend and borrow in a capital-efficient way while limiting risk. Euler includes several innovations described by the team, such as permissionless lending markets, reactive interest rates, protected collateral, MEV-resistant liquidations, multi-collateral stability pools, sub-accounts, and risk-adjusted loans. The project was incubated by Encode Club; co-founders Michael Bentley (a former postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford), Jack Prior and Doug Hoyte met at an Encode hackathon. The team plans to launch the protocol by the end of the year, integrate it into the wider DeFi ecosystem, and begin handing control to a decentralized community of custodians. Euler recently closed a financing round to grow its developer team and support integrations ahead of launch. Euler XYZ is a permissionless lending protocol being developed on the Ethereum blockchain by Dr Michael Bentley, an Oxford researcher and former post‑doc in Mathematical Biology at the University of Oxford. The protocol features reactive interest rates and aims to let users earn interest on a broader set of crypto assets. Euler positions itself as competition to established lending platforms like Compound and Aave. The team said it will use the seed funding to develop the protocol. Euler announced an $800k seed round led by Lemniscap, with participation from LAUNCHub Ventures, CMT Digital, Divergence Ventures, Block0, Cluster and angels including Luke Youngblood, Richard Burton and Josh Buckley. The raise was described as the largest by a blockchain startup coming out of Oxford.

Participated · Equity · Nov 2020

API3 builds a decentralized API (dAPI) network composed of first‑party oracles that allow traditional API providers to become their own blockchain oracles. Its Airnode design is cloud gateway infrastructure intended to let primary data providers pipe information into crypto networks with no blockchain expertise. dAPIs are planned to be governed by an API3 DAO of dAPI consumers, service providers, industry experts and partners to maximize decentralization and trust‑minimization. The project argues this model will let API providers monetize services cost‑efficiently and retain control over how their data is used while avoiding vulnerabilities introduced by third‑party oracles. API3 said it will shortly launch an alpha version of Airnode and will host hackathons using the technology. The company raised $3M in a private round to support technical development and growth of its ecosystem.